This biography is republished in full with kind permission from The Art Story – Carrie Mae Weems.
Born: 20 April 1953, United States
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
Decades before the #BlackLivesMatter movement stamped itself into our collective psyche, Carrie Mae Weems was living its message by example through provocative artwork about racial representation. Raised in a progressive Black family that bashed stereotypes, and compelled to reframe perspectives surrounding the Black experience, Weems directs focus toward the status and place of those from her race. As much of her work is autobiographical, she represents an authentic African American voice, reflecting on her own experience and interiority while also participating in a larger cultural conversation. Through a multitude of media including installation, photography, and performance, she questions the limits and chokeholds of history and tradition and forces deeper illumination into the authentic Black experience all the while asking us to consider new models to live by.
Early Life
In 1953, Carrie Mae Weems was the second of seven children born to mother Carrie Polk and father Myrlie Weems, who had migrated North to Oregon from Mississippi. Myrlie’s father had organized tenant farmers on the Sunshine Plantation, one of Mississippi’s first cooperative farms with Black and White farmers. Weems’ uncle Clarence had been photographed by Dorothea Lange in the 1930s.
Weems grew up in Portland, an area lacking other Black families. She remembers her childhood as being a happy one, and the family enjoyed vacations at the beach, and to Mount Hood. Weems’ maternal grandfather ran a janitorial service and barbecue restaurant, employing many of their family members. She says that “He was Jewish, Native American, and black, but looked very Jewish, and he knew that basically he was passing for white and that he could do things that we couldn’t so easily. So, he used all of that to make sure that his family was taken care of.”
Drawing influence from these three cultural heritages in her work, Weems noted that, in particular, “There’s a deep link between African-Americans and Jews, […] I think that there’s a shared sense of struggle in the country, and that, I think, forms an incredible bond between these two apparently very different groups of people.” Elaborating, she states, “Two of the great human disasters [have been] slavery and the annihilation of the Jewish people. We’re culturally and historically linked in a very unique way.”
Weems idolized her father, who strongly resembled boxer Muhammad Ali. She says, “He was just a really charismatic kind of guy, funny and wonderful and warm, polite, open.” He instilled a great deal of confidence in her. “My earliest memories are of my father picking me up and setting me on his knee. I was about 4 or 5. He looked at me, and he said, ‘Carrie Mae, always remember that you have a right. Right? That no matter who messes with you, you pick up the biggest stick that you can, and you fight back with it.”” He also told her, “There’s no man greater than you. You are greater than no other man.” For the young artist, this became “the bedrock of my understanding, the bedrock of my belief system that really was instilled very, very early in my life, and repeated throughout my life, this idea that we had a right to be there.”
Weems recalls finding her mother in front of the TV set weeping at the news of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. She would later use her art to explore the impact of this significant historical event on the African American community.
When Weems was eight years old her parents divorced, though they continued to live in proximity, with Weems, her siblings, and her mother moving into a house owned by her grandfather. Recently, Weems realized that the divorce affected her more than she previously thought, and it marked a moment when she stopped drawing and painting for a time, activities she had always loved.
As a child, Weems would often play dress-up, imagining herself as a famous artist. “I was simply becoming interested in this idea of being an artist in the world in some sort of way, not knowing really what the arts were. I had these great, grand visions that I would move to New York City and that I would always arrive fabulously dressed, and I would always arrive late, and I would always leave early, and everybody would want to know who I was. ‘Who is she?’ That was my fantasy.”
Most summers, Weems was sent to pick strawberries, until one year, when a drama teacher recognized her talent and paid a visit to her mother. Weems was sent to a summer program In Shakespearian theater. Through this experience, she discovered street performance, and enjoyed, as she says, “dancing at the crossroads at night to bring up the gods.”
In 1970, when she was just sixteen, Weems gave birth to her only child, daughter Faith C. Weems. An aunt and uncle played a major role in raising Faith. Weems explains that “I’ve never really been a real mother. I think my daughter and I are more friends. Of course, there’s an element of mother and daughter, but because I didn’t raise her, we have a very different kind of relationship.”
When she was seventeen, Weems moved to San Francisco to study modern dance with dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin, from whom she learned to think about the possibilities for dance to “bridge different cultures together.”
Later in 1970, Weems left home for San Francisco to study modern dance at the studio of dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin. While there, she met artists John Cage and Robert Morris. Weems explains, “I was in Anna’s company for I suppose maybe a year or two […] experimenting with very deep parts of dance and ideas about dance. Anna was really interested in ideas about peace and using dance as a way to bridge different cultures together as a vehicle for multicultural expression […] I wasn’t really so interested in dance, I just knew how to dance really well. I had a really, I think, deep sense of my body from a very early age.”
Education and Early Training
In 1971, Weems moved to New York “with a baby on my back and a cardboard suitcase.” Soon after, however, she returned to the West Coast and enrolled at the California Institute of the Arts, from which she earned a degree in 1981. She then earned an M.F.A. from the University of California, San Diego in 1984, and an M.A. in folklore studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 1987. While in San Diego, she lived with artist Lorna Simpson.
In 1973, Weems received her first camera as a birthday gift from her Marxist labor organizer boyfriend, Raymond. She recalls, “I thought, Oh, O.K. This is my tool. This is it.'” Weems was involved in the labor movement and used her camera as part of that activist work. She was particularly inspired by The Black Photographers Annual, a collection of works by African American photographers like Shawn Walker, Beuford Smith, Anthony Barboza, Ming Smith, Adger Cowans, and Roy DeCarava. Says Weems, “I remember standing in the middle of the floor flipping the pages, seeing images that just blew me away, like a bolt of lightning. I truly saw the possibility for myself – as both subject and artist. I knew that I would emulate what they had begun.”
Weems moved back to New York in 1976, immersing herself at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she met other artists and photographers like Coreen Simpson and Frank Stewart. She took a photography class taught by Dawoud Bey and worked as an assistant to Anthony Barboza. Bey remembers young Weems as possessing a great deal of “humility and passion,” and says that “We also both shared a sense that our very presence in the world, as human beings who were also black, demanded that we live lives and make work that somehow made a difference, that left the world transformed in some way, and that visualized a piece of that world that was uniquely ours and that participated in a larger cultural conversation inside of the medium of photography.” Weems also became active in the Black photography community at the Kamoinge Workshop. Later, artist Janet Henry invited her to teach classes at the Studio Museum. Soon, Weems was dividing her time between New York and California.
Mature Period
In the late 1980s, Weems was teaching at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. She states that “I always had an exercise in self-portraiture in my classes. Invariably, all of the female students were in some way covered. They were always slightly behind the thing, whether it was their hair or an object or a piece of clothing. They were always sort of hidden. They were never square. They were always doing something to obscure the clarity of themselves. Because women were always sort of interested in being objects, because we’ve been trained to be objects. We’ve been trained to be desirous in some sort of way, to present ourselves in that sort of way.”
In 1986, while working in the darkroom at the Visual Studies workshop (where she was undertaking a residency), Weems met her future husband, Jeff Hoone. He was the assistant director of the artist-run, non-profit organization Light Work from 1982 until 2021. When they met, she already recognized his name from an announcement for a black caucus in support of the Society for Photographic Education. She says, “I was like, ‘Hmm, Jeff Hoone, that’s an interesting name for a brother. I don’t know any brothers named Hoone.’ So, I wrote him this note, thinking that he was a black man: ‘It’s very nice to know that a brother is in charge over there, running this organization at Syracuse University.'” A mutual friend told her he would be stopping by the darkroom that day. As she recalls, “Jeff walked in, and I was a little taken aback. I think I was probably embarrassed because of the letter I had written. He walked in, and I looked at him, and I thought, ‘Oh my god. This is going to be my husband.'”
Late Period
In 2000, Weems produced The Hampton Project, for which she juxtaposed photographs by nineteenth-century photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston with photographs of her own.
In 2002, along with artists Deb Willis, Dawoud Bey, and Lonnie Graham, Weems co-founded Social Studies 101, a program that mentors youth in New York seeking creative careers. Following the tragic death in 2011 of a Black toddler, caught in the crossfire between two rival gangs in New York, Social Studies 101 launched Operation Activate. The anti-violence campaign took the form of billboards and posters put up around the city (as well as matchbooks distributed at bars and bodegas) that featured slogans like “A man does not become a man by killing another man,” and “Contrary to popular belief, your life does matter.”
In 2005, Weems received a Distinguished Photographer’s Award. In 2013, she was bestowed a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and became the first African American woman to have a retrospective at the Guggenheim. In 2015, she was named a Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow, and that same year, the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research presented her with the W. E. B. Du Bois Medal. She has taught photography around the country, including at Syracuse University. Since 2008, she has been represented by the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York.
Weems currently splits her time between Syracuse, New York, and Fort Greene, Brooklyn and remains married to Hoone.
The Legacy of Carrie Mae Weems
Carrie Mae Weems is one of the most influential artists living in America today. Her photography, Performance and Installation art, video art, and other multi-media works delve into pressing contemporary issues related to race, gender, identity, and political violence. Art critic Holland Cotter calls Weems “one of our most effective visual and verbal rhetoricians” and “a superb image maker and a moral force, focused and irrepressible.” Likewise, art critic Megan O’Grady calls Weems “canonical” and a “gifted storyteller,” and asserts that Weems’ photographs and short films, as gimlet-eyed and gutsy as they are visually compelling, have gone a long way toward resetting our expectations of pictures and challenging our assumptions about her largely African American subjects.”
Many contemporary American artists cite Weems as a key influence. Artist and photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier, a former student of Weems’, says that Weems’ practice has inspired her “to hold myself accountable at all times, to raise questions from my own perspective and, most of all, to leave the door open and keep a seat at the table for others when given an institutional opportunity,” as well as to support other artists and to have the courage to “confront the inequalities of our time.” Frazier adds that Weems taught her “that I was not simply a photographer making beautifully framed objects but rather an artist who articulates creative thoughts and ideologies that dismantle institutional and systemic racism, injustice, hierarchy, violence against black bodies, and crimes against humanity.” Artist, photographer, and filmmaker Laurie Simmons has been inspired by Weems to use her art to explore “women in interior space,” and Conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas was influenced from an early age by Weems’ use of archival materials in her art. Meanwhile, Iranian artist Shirin Neshat has been influenced by the way in which Weems uses her powerful voice and position as an artist to work as a sort of “cultural activist.”