“This country is just too f***ed up about color. It’s a distraction. People at each other’s throats just because they are a different color. It’s the height of insanity, and it will hold any nation back – or any neighborhood back or anything back. Blacks know that some whites didn’t want to give up slavery – that if they had their way, they would still be under the yoke. And they can’t pretend they don’t know that. If you got a slave, master or Klan in your blood, blacks can sense that. That stuff lingers to this day. Just like Jews can sense Nazi blood and Serbs can sense Croatian Blood. It’s doubtful that America’s ever going to get rid of that stigmatization. It’s a country founded on the backs of slaves. ~ Excerpt from a Bob Dylan Interview – Rolling Stone Magazine September 27, 2012

Above: Carrie Mae Weems. An Anthropological Debate from From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, 1995–96. Chromogenic print with etched text on glass, 26 1/2 x 22 3/4 in. Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift on behalf of The Friends of Education of The Museum of Modern Art. From an original daguerreotype taken by J.T. Zealy, 1850. Peabody Museum, Harvard University. Copyright President & Fellows of Harvard College, 1977. All rights reserved. Digital image © 2012, MoMA, N.Y.

The Frist Center for the Visual Arts, also known as “The Little Museum That Could,” has been mounting important, ground-breaking exhibitions ever since opening its doors in Nashville, Tennessee, 12 years ago. Housed in a beautiful Art Deco post office from the early 30s—the building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places—The Frist is Nashville’s answer, on a smaller scale of course, to museums like the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It may be small, but it mounts big. It’s most recent stellar exhibition was Fairy Tales, Monsters, and the Genetic Imagination. Organized by Frist’s ingenious chief curator, Mark Scala, it has travelled throughout Canada before returning to its home base.artes fine arts magazine

Following in Scala’s inventive footsteps—not an easy thing to do—was the Carrie Mae Weems’ retrospective, Three Decades of Photographs and Video (ran through January 13, 2013). Beautifully curated by Kathryn Delmez, who completed her thesis on this African American artist, the provocative and timely exhibition—think Spielberg’s Lincoln, Tarantino’s Django Unchained, both currently up for Oscars, and Obama in the White House—will be on the road throughout 2013 and well into 2014. Leaving the Frist, its originating venue, it travels to the Portland, Oregon Art Museum, (February 2-May 19, 2013), Cleveland’s Museum of Art (June 30-September 29, 2013, Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University in California (October 16, 2013 – January 5, 2014), ending its run at the Guggenheim in New York City (January 24-April 23, 2014).

For Carrie Mae Weems, race, gender, class, identity, culture, history and institutional power are subjects she examines from every conceivable angle. Her over-arching theme is what it ultimately means to be a human being, past and present. Weems has been showing her work, here and abroad, solo and group, for over three decades. Still, her work and reputation, like the lives of most African Americans, has been flying mostly under the radar. This is a fact her body of work aims to change, “It’s fair to say that black folks,” she told one interviewer, “operate under a cloud of invisibility—this too is part of my work, is indeed central to the work…Even in the midst of the great social changes we’ve experienced just in the last years, with the election of Barack Obama. For the most part, the lives of African Americans remain invisible.” Viewed in this light, is her retrospective is something of a corrective—an early marker, pointing the way to a post-racial era?

To use an overworked term, the paring of Weems’s vision with curator, Delmez, is a marriage made heaven. And I am not talking about the team’s visual canniness—a given in this case—but the exhibition’s imaginative layout, turning the visitor’s viewing experience, in gallery after gallery, into a poignant walk through the artist’s own personal history. It becomes the history of African-Americans, in particular, and by extension, peoples around the world. Preparing us for our journey is Family Pictures and Stories (1978-84), the artist’s first major photographic series. Here Weems generously shares, through candid images with text and actual audio recordings, the inner and outer lives of large her Portland, Oregon-based family. One particular picture, Family Reunion, depicts her family at what appears to be the beginnings of a picnic.

During her opening talk at the Frist, Weems confided: “No matter what I am doing I’m always trying to figure out how to have a conversation with myself around the materials and ideas that are deeply troubling for me, things that keep me up at night and get me up in the morning. What are we? What are we doing together? How do we negotiate and make it through this complicated maze of life that we are involved in? These are the only questions I really have. And these are the questions I come back to again and again and again and again and again, but through a different door, from a slightly different angle.” As the exhibition readily shows, Weems, has been traveling around the world since being handed a camera by a friend in 1974, looking for the answers to those questions.

In her search, Weems has covered much of the globe, and still traveling. In her Sea Island series (1991-92) we find her documenting the black Gullah communities of remote coastal South Carolina and Georgia. Their semi-isolation fostered the survival of many African customs and beliefs. In her Slave Coast and Africa series (both 1993) Weems navigates the cities of Ghana, Senegal, and Mali, studying the ‘architecture of slavery’—including slave-holding facilities—in some of the once-important centers along the slave trade route.

Left: In The Mountains of Santiago de Cuba, gelatin silver print, 30 x 30 in. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

In Dreaming of Cuba (2002), left, wearing a long flowing dress, a stylistic signature used by the artist in numerous series, the she focuses her camera on the hard life of Cuba’s, ‘everyday’ men and women at home and at work—while sometimes placing herself in those same pictures.

In Roaming (2006), a stark photographic essay, Weems flirts openly with the dramatic, playing Beatrice to our Dante. Donning a long black dress, and always with her back to us, she leads us through the labyrinths of Rome, where we find ourselves standing before grandiose monuments and intimidating ‘buildings of power,’inviting us to ponder history and our place in it. In Museum Series (2007-present), as she continues to play the muse, we stand with Weems, face to façade, before the world’s great museums. She is thinking about artists—black, females, and other disenfranchised groups—whose work has been marginalized within the establishment art world.

Right: Not Manet’s Type (1997), pigment ink print, 30 x 18 in. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

This is a subject she first touched on in her provocative series, Not Manet’s Type (1997), right, critiquing how white male ‘masters in the canon’ define female beauty through their paintings. Here, in one photo, scantily clad and lying nude across a bed, Weems offers herself as a would-be artist’s model. The first work in this narrative series reads “It was clear, I was not Manet’s type; Picasso—who had a way with women—only used me & Duchamp never even considered me.”

Much of Weems’ work is deliberately crafted to expose the underlying racism in mainstream culture. In Ain’t Jokin (1987-1988), a series of staged photographs with text, the artist pairs Afro American individuals with hot button visuals, like a man holding a watermelon and a woman a fried chicken drumstick. One photograph, illustrating a racist joke that has been around a long time, brought a knowing smile to my face, thus proving her point? Here, an attractive black woman – as the joke goes, it was Diana Ross, or any other famous black woman – is seen looking into a mirror while a white faced woman stares back at her. The text reads, “Looking Into The Mirror, The Black Woman Asked, “Mirror Mirror On The Wall, Who’s The Finest Of Them All? The Mirror Says, “Snow White, You Black Bitch, And Don’t You Forget It!!!” Had these works and words come from the hand of a so-called white person – as they do give strength to negative stereotypes – it would be considered inflammatory, especially by today’s, bound, tied, and politically correct adherents.

Above, left: Mirror, Mirror from Ain’t Jokin’, 1987–88. Gelatin silver print, 20 x 16 in. International Center of Photography, New York, Gift of Julie Ault, 62.2001. © Carrie Mae Weems.

Though photography has long been Weems’ mainstay, she is equally adept in presenting her “educational lessons” in video, as well as installation. In Afro-Chic (2009), filmed in luscious color at a modern day fashion show, the artist playfully revisits the `60s, when the phrase ‘Black is Beautiful’ held sway, and ‘Afro’ hairstyles with blacks and whites, alike, were all the rage. In the background of the video, adding a touch of political history, hangs a picture of Angela Davis in her radical activist days, sporting, like all of the models jauntily treading the runway, her own iconic, trend-setting Afro.

Right: Afro-Chic (video still), 2010. DVD, 5 minutes, 30 seconds. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. © Carrie Mae Weems.

In Ritual and Revolution (1998)—one of the three installations on view—the viewer, rubbing shoulders with history, is made to walk through low-hanging, diaphanous muslin banners, each bearing an historical image, such as the Palace of Versailles, and the Hermitage,where struggles for equality took place. In the background, filling the air with sonorous sound is Weems reciting the history of various battles for freedom, lost and won.

From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995-96)—a powerful indictment of man’s inhumanity to man—is Weems’ most painful and guilt-conjuring series. Using early daguerreotypes of African slaves taken in the 19th and early 20th century, which she has re-photographed, enlarged, and tinted a bloody red, suggests lives taken and blood spilled, she goes in for the kill. By adding denigrating bold-faced phrases to each individual image, suchlike “Others said ‘only thing a niggah could do was shine my shoes,’” “you became playmate to the patriarch”, and “an anthropological debate”, she is mirroring the intent of the original photographer’s words, define, as well as distancing the black man from the white man’s world. As Weems said in her talk “I was trying to bring together the history of photography, on the one hand, and the history of blacks in photography on the other…or at least the history of the representation of blacks through American photography.”

Left: And I Cried from From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, 1995–96. Chromogenic print with etched text on glass, 42 x 31 in. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift on behalf of The Friends of Education of The Museum of Modern Art © Carrie Mae Weems. Digital image © 2012, MoMA, N.Y.

In Colored People (1989-90), an edition of hand-tinted photographs of young children, the artist celebrates the diversity of skin color—the many shades of black— among African Americans, while at the same time pointing out the existence of a color-based caste system within African American communities, and society as a whole. Comprised mainly of triptychs of three repeated images, each portrait with its own color and identifying, the titles are intended to comment on the artificiality of such limiting and meaningless labels. Reading from left to right, one sets reads, Moody, Blue, Girl, another, Blue, Black, Boy, a third, Golden, Yella, Girl. In Slow Fade To Black (2010-11), a series of barely-discernible images of famous African American female performers, from Josephine Baker, to Marion Anderson, to Nina Simone, are all purposely presented out of focus. Weems laments their fading presence in our collective memory.

Right: Black Boy from Colored People, 1989–90. Triptych, three toned gelatin silver prints with Prestype and frame, Overall: 16 x 48 in.; Images: 16 x 16 in. each. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Photography Committee, 2001.257a-d. © Carrie Mae Weems.

The pièce de résistance, and the perfect place to end the exhibition, which is exactly what I did, is at the feet of Kitchen Table Talk (1990). This is unarguably Weems’ most startlingly-beautiful, if not important, work to date. Accorded a gallery of its own, the series, a set of twenty cinematically brilliant photographs and fourteen stand-alone text panels tells the story of a modern black woman. The writing, highly reminiscent of Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives (1909) with its honesty and straight- forward simplicity, tells the story, with Weems playing the central role of a woman in search of herself. Filmed around a dramatically-lit kitchen table, it features her male partner, assorted children, and her girlfriends. It begins with Weems, as Everywoman, talking about needing a man, and ends with the artist sitting alone at the table playing solitaire. Through trials and tribulations, as she tells it, the artist, in what I suspect are scenes taken from her own life, has become independent, self-reliant, and strong within herself. Hers is a God-given gift that the artist wants us to know is within reach of us all.

By Edward Rubin, Contributing Writer

Carrie Mae Weems’ retrospective, Three Decades of Photographs and Video travels to the Portland, Oregon Art Museum, (February 2-May 19, 2013), Cleveland’s Museum of Art (June 30-September 29, 2013, Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University in California (October 16, 2013 – January 5, 2014), ending its run at the Guggenheim in New York City (January 24-April 23, 2014).