Weems, Women, and Worries

¶ … Mae Weems The 1965 Moynihan Report was not the first government report to blame blacks for the very factors that condition their lives. It would be lovely if it were the last such report, but it won't be. An unintended contribution of the Moynihan report was it articulated precisely what Americans thought at the time -- put the biases down in black and white, plain as day. The instability of black families was the cause (as if anyone really knew what that word meant) of the "deterioration" of African-American life.

Carrie Mae Weems had been using photography to tell racial narratives for five years, since the time when she received her first camera as a gift at the age of 20. This story of black family life was counterpoint to the Moynihan report, again in black and white, with an accompanying oral history of the quotidian life of Weems's own multigenerational family. Using the stereotypical currency of the Moynihan Report, Weems addressed prejudice head on.

The Moynihan Report was a maze of statistics and tables and indexes -- easy enough for the uninitiated to loose their way. In contrast Weems's next bodies of work were a clear trail of breadcrumbs back to the source of "the deterioration" -- a long, continuous history of racism.

She took studio photographs of models behaving in stereotypical fashion, such as her "Black Man Holding Watermelon." Weems constructed still-life arrangements of tchotchkes with racial themes, including salt-and-pepper shakers painted to look like Mammy and Sambo or a figure of a uniformed bell captain.

An in-your-face exhibit held in 1989-90 featured portraits of black children photographed in the style of mug shots, all tinted with monochromatic color evoking consideration of the skin-color variation of black people that is also associated with social hierarchical status by those who have internalized such racial distinctions. Some of Weems's strongest evidentiary work was when she chronicles the racial argument of Louis Agassiz, the scientist from Harvard who attempted to prove his ill-begotten theory of blacks as an inferior and separate race.

The photographs are presented as "evidential specimens, nothing more," and were all taken from found sources, in particular the 1850 archive of daguerreotype images from South Carolina of African-born black slaves. Women figure prominently in these photographs, largely because of the many different roles that female slaves played in their captive lives. For women more than men, the functional lines between black slaves and the lowest class whites blurred. Black women worked within a quasi-intimate ecosystem that permitted entry into the private realm of the households were they were enslaved.

The bare-breasted women in the daguerreotype images are objectified in ways that the men are not. Because of this, the inclusion of the women in the series seems a feminist narrative. It undeniably is, but the photos are also inalterably conflated with the encompassing racial narrative. Weems created a timeless quasi-anthropological pictorial essay with the capacity to be fresh for each subsequent exhibit. Weems is known for provoking critical social insight of the American experience, through her conceptual installations, documentary photographs, and videos.

She was granted a "genius" grant in 2013 by the MacArthur Foundation for the way she unites her aesthetic mastery with activism.

With the new traveling retrospective that opened in the fall of 2013 at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University and fittingly ended at the Guggenheim in New York City, Weems has had some time to consider how she is perceived as an artist and a photographer: "People frame my work in terms of race and gender and don't integrate it into broader historical questions, and I think that limits the possibilities of what the public is allowed to understand about our production in the country.

It's one of the reasons that I'm interested in using my platform at the Guggenheim to bring forth voices that are rarely heard together. If you invite only African-Americans to the table, then you're participating in your own isolation." Indeed, issues of isolation, personal identity, and racism feature prominently in Weems work. Deborah Solomon, a critic at WNYC, noted that Weems seems to frequently appear in her photographs with her back facing the camera, and she may be juxtaposed next to a door.

It is as if, says Solomon, "The question she is always asking is: where can I enter? Where as a black artist can I enter art history, where can I enter the world?" Indeed, it this quality of Weems photographs to be at once intimate and provocative that contributes to a sense of universality.

"She has a unique ability, I think," said Solomon, "to meditate on the large themes of history, such as injustice, while exploring tiny moments that add a lot of humanity to the photographs." Weems is an artist who is definitely socially motivated to highlight the most challenging and intractable issues of our time -- of any time, one would suppose: gender, class, race, equality, and justice.

Over the last 30 some odd years, Weems has been our conscious and our voice, using autobiographical and documentary series of photographs to present complex contemporary art. Her watershed body of work, Kitchen Table Series (1990), that included audio recordings, written text, and videos featured Weems as a subject in many of the photographs. The series is philosophically and conceptually complex, with a startling contemporariness despite the passage of nearly 25 years.

It is this timeless capacity of Weems work that enables her to examine history and while establishing a current juxtaposition of the issues she poses for consideration and understanding. Although Weems primarily features blacks in her work, she intends for "people of color to stand for the human multitudes" and strives for resonance with all audiences who view and experience her work. Conclusion When following the work of a woman.