Hidden Figures: Carrie Mae Weems #BlackHERstoryMonth 8/28 (Patreon)

Hidden Figures: Carrie Mae Weems #BlackHERstoryMonth 8/28

Carrie Mae Weems is an American artist who works with text, fabric, audio, digital images, and installation video but is best known for her work in the field of photography. Her award-winning photographs, films, and videos have been displayed in over 50 exhibitions in the United States and abroad and focus on serious issues that face African Americans today, such as racism, sexism, politics, and personal identity. Weems was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1953, the second of seven children. While in her early twenties, she was politically active in the labor movement as a union organizer. Her first camera, which she received as a birthday gift, was used for this work before being used for artistic purposes. She was inspired to pursue photography after she came across The Black Photography Annual, a book of images by African-American photographers; this led her to New York City, where she began to meet other artists and photographers. She returned to San Francisco, but lived bi-coastally and was involved with a community of photographers in New York. In 1983, Weems completed her first collection of photographs, text, and spoken word, called Family Pictures and Stories. The images told the story of her family, and she has said that in this project she was trying to explore the movement of black families out of the South and into the North, using her family as a model for the larger theme. Sexism was the next focal point for her; it was the topic of one of her most well known collections, called The Kitchen Table series, which was completed in 1990. She has expressed disbelief and concern about the exclusion of images of the black community, particularly black women, from the popular media, and aims to represent these excluded subjects and speak to their experience through her work. In her almost 30-year career, Weems has won numerous awards: her talents have been recognized by numerous colleges, including Harvard University and Wellesley College, with fellowships, artist-in-residence and visiting professor positions. She was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2013. In 2015 Weems was named a Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow, and in September 2015, the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research presented her with the W. E. B. Du Bois Medal. The first comprehensive retrospective of her work opened in September 2012 at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee, as a part of the center's exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video. The exhibition ran until January 13, 2013 and when it re-opened in January 2014 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, it marked the first time an "African-American woman [was] ever given a solo exhibition" at the Guggenheim. Weems lives in Brooklyn and Syracuse, New York, with her husband Jeffrey Hoone. She continues to produce art that provides social commentary on the experiences of people of color, especially black women, in America. #CarrieMaeWeems #HiddenFigures ****************** Merchandise! MAKE SURE U GETTA SHIRT!! https://www.teepublic.com/user/sssseren Follow me on social media! Twitter: @seren_sensei Instagram: @sensei_aishitemasu Personal Tumblr: http://sensei-aishitemasu.tumblr.com Tumblr for my work: https://sssseren.tumblr.com Snapchat: sssseren GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/tc5wh7q Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/seren_sensei ****************** Did you know I wrote a book? ☺️ 'So, About That... A Year of Contemporary Essays on Race and Pop Culture' Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/About-That-Contemporary-Essays-Culture-ebook/dp/B013V0CHK6 Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B013V0CHK6 Digital download (e-book): https://gumroad.com/l/IkUa ****************** Links: http://carriemaeweems.net Carrie Mae Weems Biography: http://carriemaeweems.net/bio.html Carrie Mae Weems - Three Decades of Photography and Video: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300176896/carrie-mae-weems Carrie Mae Weems - MacArthur Foundation: https://www.macfound.org/fellows/905/ 'The Genius of Carrie Mae Weems:' https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/25/the-genius-of-carrie-mae-weems/ 'Carrie Mae Weems Reflects on Her Seminal, Enduring Kitchen Table Series:' https://www.wmagazine.com/story/carrie-mae-weems-kitchen-table-series-today-interview 'Mary J. Blige and Carrie Mae Weems in Conversation: On Race, Women, Music and the Future:' https://www.wmagazine.com/story/mary-j-blige-mudbound-carrie-mae-weems-photographs-w-magazine-art-issue 'Carrie Mae Weems - A Look Back On Three Decades:' http://time.com/52802/carrie-mae-weems-a-look-back-on-three-decades/ 'Testimony of a Clear-eyed Witness - Carrie Mae Weems Charts the Black Experience in Photographs:' https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/24/arts/design/carrie-mae-weems-charts-the-black-experience-in-photographs.html 'CARRIE MAE WEEMS AND A SHIFTING STAGE:' https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/carrie-mae-weems