CARRIE MAE WEEMSA SURVEY
February 7 - March 8, 2008
Opening reception for the artist, Thursday, February 7th, 6 - 8 pm
Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to present Carrie Mae Weems, A Survey, the artist's inaugural exhibition at the gallery and her first exhibition in New York in several years. Although she has exhibited her work extensively throughout the United States and abroad over the past twenty-five years this exhibition marks Weems' highly anticipated return to the New York gallery scene. A Survey brings together work from the beginning of her career through her most recent projects produced in Rome, where she was a fellow at the American Academy in 2005/2006, as well as other series from Europe and Louisiana. This exhibition celebrates the breadth of Weems' career and highlights her overall trajectory toward enfranchisement and empowerment through photography. What becomes noticeable is Weems' penchant for storytelling. Her work is organized into cohesive bodies which function like chapters in a perpetually unfolding narrative. It begins autobiographically with her earliest series of family portraits, evolves into a more general exploration of African American cultural identity rooted in American Icons, exploration of color, slavery, Africa, and the appropriation of historical ethnographical images, before morphing and expanding into a mediation on Western history, art history, architecture and its implications for power structures. Weems' use of props as installation elements further accentuates her interest in stories, folklore and drama. An installation becomes like a stage set and her practice like that of a director. Some examples of Weems' video work, where she fully exploits this role, will also be on view.Considered one of the most influential contemporary American artists, Carrie Mae Weems has investigated yearning, loss, cultural identity, and the visual consequences of power throughout her renowned career. Determined as ever to enter the picture-both literally and metaphorically-she has sustained an on-going dialogue within contemporary discourse.Carrie Mae Weems earned her BA from the California Institute of the Arts, an MFA from the University of California at San Diego, and she studied folklore at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the recipient of the 2005/2006 Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize Fellowship, and was awarded the Pollack Krasner Foundation Grant in Photography and the Visual Arts Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has been represented at DAK'ART, the Biennale of Contemporary Art in Dakar, Senegal, and the Johannesburg Biennale in Johannesburg, South Africa. She has had solo and group shows at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Newcomb Art Gallery at Tulane University, the International Center of Photography, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, the Walker Art Center, and the Whitney Museum. Her work is included in both public and private collections, including the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
