Carrie Mae Weems at the Barbican and Kunstmuseum Basel
Carrie Mae Weems at the Barbican and Kunstmuseum Basel
'Weems’ photographs were kept almost exclusively separate upstairs at the Barbican; but they’re the best of her practice and embody her entwined artistic and political resistance.'
Welcome our guest writer Jelena Sofronijevic —a producer, curator, writer and researcher based in London, who makes content at the intersections of cultural history, politics, and the arts.
Carrie Mae Weems’ radical work in photography and film, performance art and academia, is often misrepresented, limited to an articulation of ‘the’ Black American experience. But there’s nothing singular about the artist’s practice. Indeed, it is her multidisciplinary mode that lets her understand race, class, and gender through plural perspectives.
Weems is one of America’s most influential contemporary artists; European institutions have been slow to catch on, but a wave of interest has recently emanated from Germany, culminating in a new tour of iterative exhibitions across the continent. From her first UK exhibition with Autograph, founded in 1980s Brixton to support Black photographers, Weems returned to London in 2023 with her largest UK exhibition to date, spanning three decades of her multidisciplinary practice, and over 300 years of American history.
As late as 2014, Weems became the first Black woman to have a retrospective exhibition at New York’s Guggenheim. But, in the words of the artist, her work is more about whiteness, than African American culture: how ‘White America - Anglo-America - saw itself in relationship to the Black subject’. For Weems, populations and migrations might differ, but race and identity are global phenomena. An American Blackness, and whiteness, if it even exists, is simply one articulation.
Her proclaimed universality permits her to connect - and exhibit in the context of - Blacknesses experienced in Europe. The Evidence of Things Not Seen, the title of the first and final iteration at Württembergischer Kunstverein and Kunstmuseum Basel, in Switzerland, is taken from James Baldwin – the thinker referenced too in Johny Pitts’ Home is Not a Place at The Photographers’ Gallery, which opened at the same time as Weems’. Parallels can be seen in her performance films – most recently, The Shape of Things (2021), on the circus of American politics and one of its ringmasters, Donald Trump – and those of the British artist Isaac Julien. And likewise, we did well to ignore the articles instructing to get Julien’s concurrent exhibition at Tate Britain ‘done in a day’. These are histories to be returned to, and sat with, over time.
Weems rose to prominence in the early 1980s, as traditional documentary photography was falling out of fashion. Her ‘direct intervention’ in daguerreotypes from the Harvard Museum archives - with colour, tints, and text - challenges their original use in perpetuating systemic racism, inequality, and violence, whilst revealing how colonial stereotypes linger still. Tints like red hint at colourism and shadism, as forms of internalised racism first externally imposed by white gazes. Works from the series Slow Fade to Black (2019), featuring entertainers like Josephine Baker, Lena Horne, and Katherine Dunham, highlights the hyper-visibility of Black women, reclaiming for them some personal space.
Weems’ photographs were kept almost exclusively separate upstairs at the Barbican; but they’re the best of her practice, and embody her entwined artistic and political resistance. In Basel, works from the Missing Link (2003) come first, and in conversation with the film, Lincoln, Lonnie and Me (2012), relating to the city’s particular, tricky history of Carnival. These vital photographs were somewhat lost in London, layered atop on wallpapers, which were their main contribution to the Somerset House exhibition, Black Venus.
With these ‘appropriated photographs’, we get glimpses of the artist as art historian (and lecturer). Other works expose the historic contributions of Black painters like Norman Lewis oft hidden in plain sight. In Painting the Town (2021), a series provoked by the murder of George Floyd, Weems explores the relationship between abstract expressionism and protest as forms of expression. (She also references Cuban-American cultural titans like Félix González-Torres, Eleanor Antin, and Ana Mendieta.) A radical way to open the show, of an artist more associated with portraiture than landscape.
Weems’ own words guide us through the space; rooms light in colour, not heavy with captions, arranged like musical compositions. She works with the curators, as much as we viewers, encouraged to participate; we might sit in her Land of Broken Dreams: A Case Study Room (2016), a tribute to Black Power leaders of the 1960s. It’s a welcome breathing space, shared with the Barbican’s last show of another American icon, Alice Neel. (They even borrow the same chair.) Though smaller in scale, Kunstmuseum Basel is even more generous with space, airing billowing sheets of textile works from their Harvard University research, and encouraging movement around the old paper mill – reflecting the way the artist moves through their practice.
Beyond her infamous Kitchen Table (1990) series, we get more of Weems’ political activism, with works on communism, Marxism, and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. She expresses solidarity with other marginalised communities; take Around 22 Million Very Tired and Very Angry People (1991), addressing everything from Atlantic slave trade routes to the Algerian War of Independence.
Covering so much of her practice, we appreciate how much the artist has lived through, pushing back against the wider underrepresentation of older women. The non-chronological curation is a triumph, suggesting continuities, and reflecting Weems’ bid the collapse the past/present binary. She also collaborates with young people and students, in contemporary series which literally recreate the social construction of historical memory.
Whilst based in the US, many of her works are grounded in grand, European institutions; architectures which persisted – and were promoted – from the Roman Empire to Mussolini’s fascist Italy. Weems literally puts the (and her) Muse in Museums (2006—present), highlighting the complex relationship between artist and institution. But no doubt, she ‘won over’ both the Kunstmuseum Basel, and the Barbican’s panopticon, in another sensitive exhibition for the brutalist build.
Listen to curator Florence Ostende on Carrie Mae Weems’ series, From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–1996) at the Barbican here
Listen to curator Alice Wilke on Carrie Mae Weems’ Africa Series (1993), at the Kunstmuseum Basel here
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