Description
“This black and white photo comes from Weems’ “Kitchen Table Series” which portrayed Weems in various domestic scenes in which the artist performs various stories, creating a narrative about relationships, family, race, sex and society. The work is evocative, mysterious and dramatic. What more can one hope for in the art we live with?” — Jim Hedges, The Huffington Post
The seminal Kitchen Table Series by Carrie Mae Weems is widely recognized as a masterpiece of performance and story-telling within the photographic image. In this series, Weems uses a subtle vocabulary of props, gesture, and gaze to frame complex questions about identity, gender construction, representation, parenthood, and the nature of human relationships. Weems describes her intention of Kitchen Table Series as a personal view on the world around her, “I endeavored to intertwine themes as I have found them in–racial, sexual, and cultural identity and history–and presented them with overtones of humor and sadness, loss and redemption.” The nonlinear narrative and issues presented in Weems’ Kitchen Table Series remain as topical and thought-provoking today as when the images were first created in the early 1990s. Rendered in exquisite black-and-white, this silver gelatin print is hand-printed by Griffin Editions in New York City.
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Carrie Mae Weems is an internationally recognized artist who has won numerous awards and fellowships, including the 2005-2006 Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize Fellowship and the Pollack Krasner Foundation Grant in Photography. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: Social Studies, a retrospective, was held at Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo in Spain in 2010 and has been nominated for a prestigious European exhibition award. A book of the same name as the exhibition was published concurrently with the exhibition and is available through Light Work. Weems’ art can be found in various permanent collections, such as at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She was recently featured on PBS’ Artists in the 21st Century series. For more information about Carrie Mae Weems, see www.carriemaeweems.net.
