Carrie Mae Weems

The Völklingen Ironworks flooded in red light
Copyright: Weltkulturerbe Völklinger Hütte | Oliver Dietze

Weems

Weems

born 1953 in Portland, USA
lives and works in Syracuse, USA

Web presence

Website: https://www.carriemaeweems.net/  

Instagram: Carrie Mae Weems (@carriemaeweems) • Instagram-Fotos und -Videos 

Works

The Push, The Call, The Scream, The Dream

Date
2021

Material
Photographs

Description

In The Push, The Call, The Scream, The Dream, US artist Carrie Mae Weems combines photographic works, most of them reworked finds from media archives. Among them: photographs of civil rights activist Medgar Evers’s 1963 funeral and Charles Moore’s iconic photos of police violence against students in Birmingham, Alabama, demonstrating for African American rights and freedoms. Enlarging the photographs or sometimes defamiliarizing them with blue or pink filters, she arranges them in various groups across the entire wall.

Went Looking for Africa

Date
1992–2012

Material 
Ceramics

Description

Weems created the handmade plates from the series Went Looking for Africa, printed with texts by the artist, as part of her study of Africa and the histories of slavery and colonialism. Her poetic lines trace her encounters with African heritage, as in the proverbs of McIntosh County, Georgia, or the songs she heard on St. Simons Island—places inseparably linked to slavery and thus to Africa by the history of their cotton plantations.