Carrie Mae Weems will present her work in a public lecture, followed by a conversation with Mabel O. Wilson. The event will include an audience question-and-answer session.

Carrie Mae Weems is a widely influential conceptual artist known for work that investigates history, identity, and power. Weems’s artistic practice is primarily photographic but also incorporates text, fabric, audio, installation, and video. Her approach to image-making ranges from staged and serialized narrative to appropriation and adaptation of archival and ethnographic imagery.  

Weems’s artworks include:

• Kitchen Table Series, in this 1990 series, Weems casts herself in the role of lover, friend, mother, and solitary woman in simply staged black and white photographs
• From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, a series of 33 photographs of African American people from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries appropriated from various archives, adapted and overlaid with text
• Roaming, a series of photographs created during Weems’s 2006 residency at the American Academy in Rome in which the artist uses her body to approach various historical sites in the city
• Painting the Town, a series of photographs of boarded-up house fronts in Weems’s birthplace of Portland, Oregon following the 2020 demonstrations staged by Black Lives Matter and other groups to protest the murder of George Floyd and structural racist violence in the U.S.

Since the 1980s, Weems’s work has been seen around the world in exhibitions that include Reflections for Now at Barbican Art Gallery in London and The Evidence of Things Not Seen, organized by Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart and shown at Kunstmuseum Basel. Her panoramic video installation The Shape of Things, shown almost continuously in museum venues since its 2021 premiere at the Park Avenue Armory, is on view at Gladstone Gallery through November 9th. In addition to her solo work, Weems has led multiple collective public art projects and multi-disciplinary performances, collaborating with activists, artists, students, musicians, poets, theorists, and writers. 

Weems’s many accolades include the National Medal of Arts, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Joseph Hazen Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Her work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and The Tate Modern, among others.

Weems works and lives in Syracuse, New York. 

The conversation will be moderated by Mabel O. Wilson. Wilson is the Nancy and George E Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, chair of African American and African Diaspora Studies, and director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University. With her practice Studio&, she was a member of the design team for the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia. In 2021, she co-curated the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America at the Museum of Modern Art. Among her many publications, Wilson most recently co-edited the volume Race and Modern Architecture: From the Enlightenment to Today (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). 

Support

This lecture is endowed by Wendy Evans Joseph.

This event is organized by The Architectural League and co-presented by The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union.

League programs are also made possible, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.