Translating Black Power and Beauty—: Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems is an activist, artist-photographer, and videographer, well-known for her photographic series and multi-screen projections relating to family, beauty, and memory. Also a successful performance and installation artist, she has, for the last twenty-five years, relied on stories of life in the low country of South Carolina, antebellum New Orleans, cities in Senegal, Ghana, and Italy. An artist concerned about iconography and the creation of icons, over the years she has constructed a series of works questioning black women’s presence in popular and material culture as well as art history. By highlighting these inequities within her art, Weems draws on a multitude of depictions to establish a presence and place for black women throughout history by creating images on non-traditional photographic surfaces such as fabric, glass, ceramics, and wallpaper. In the 1990s, narrative and the spoken word became central to her art-making which revealed a new range for Weems as she was able to broaden her work by performing abstracted memories culled from America’s cultural and political histories.

Weems is a passionate researcher who uses socio-psychological depictions to skillfully reflect the past and the present, the cultural and the political. The black female body has occupied a prominent place in her art. Trained as a folklorist, Weems uses lore and humor as well as re-enactments about desire and tragedy to reflect on historical events as well as her own personal memory. She often uses her own body to locate the social imaginary found in history by performing in front of the camera. The heightened interest in black women’s photography in the latter part of the twentieth century was, in part, born out of the civil rights movement in America, and Weems consciously created images of related stories from diverse communities where she became interpreter and eyewitness. Throughout her career, Weems recorded stories and images that shaped her political work. One installation titled Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment offered Weems a unique opportunity to contextualize in words and images the political stories of the “isms” that surfaced over the notion of free speech, beauty, identity, oppression, and love over the last forty years. The “isms” that Weems challenges and assesses include racism, feminism, sexism, anarchism, optimism, pessimism, collectivism, egoism, humanitarianism, intellectualism, liberalism, modernism, and postmodernism. In marking this moment in time, some forty years since 1968, Weems is well aware of the time of social and political unrest and the organizing of students and political activists who showed their discontent with the racist political climate in cities around the country. This was a time when women, men, and children debated openly under the threat of intimidation, violence, and death their dissatisfaction with racial inequality from education to housing and employment. Weems demonstrates her understanding of this in the way she evokes a significant moment through lighting and gesture in both her videos and her portraits. This is what sets Weems’s work apart from documentary photography.

Photography during the 1950s and 1960s, when Weems was a young observer of the news, shaped her ideas about the human condition. By re-staging and re-imagining the political climate in American history, Weems’s role as provocateur forces us to visualize a moment which ultimately heightens our sensibilities to want to inquire and question the history memory. Film scholar and feminist critic Valerie Smith writes that “black feminist thinking has always assumed that race and gender are mutually dependent, interlocking cultural constructions and projections” (xii). Following in this tradition, Weems informs us as to how her work is immersed in this interlocking of racial politics and feminist ideologies. She uses the photograph as an extension of this type of black feminist thought. In Peg Zeglin Brand’s thought provoking edited volume Beauty Matters she introduces us to Weems’s photographs in her much discussed kitchen table series: “[Weems] invites us to look at the representation of women as she is situated in context: a context in which her beauty—and the value-laden concept of “beauty”—operates historically, culturally, and politically” (4).

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