Color Real and Imagined

Carrie Mae Weems

Steeped in African American history, Carrie Mae Weems makes alternately searing and tender photographs and videos that explore race, family, class, and gender identity. The artist, who has also worked in verse and performance, embraces activism throughout all her work—in particular, she looks to history in order to better understand the present. In the early 1990s, Weems rose to prominence with her beloved “Kitchen Table” series: intimate black-and-white photographs that undermine tropes of African American life and womanhood as they depict the artist seated at her kitchen table alone or alongside various other characters. Over the course of her career, Weems has received countless honors, including the Prix de Roma, the National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, and the MacArthur “Genius Grant.” In 2014, she became the first Black woman to mount a retrospective at the Guggenheim, and her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.