Gender and art

"Carrie Mae Weems: The Museum Series presents an intimate look at an ongoing series that Weems began in 2006. The artist stands, with her back turned to the camera, in proximity to some of the world's leading museums and cultural institutions. The resulting images act as ruminations on the collecting and exhibiting practices of these sites.

[...]

Carrie Mae Weems: The Museum Series is organized by Assistant Curator Lauren Haynes and runs concurrently with Weems’s mid-career retrospective, Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video, on view at the Guggenheim Museum from January 24 – May 14, 2014."

- See more at: http://www.studiomuseum.org/exhibition/carrie-mae-weems-the-museum-series#sthash.UyKG0xLU.dpuf

NEW YORK, NY.- The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video, the first major New York museum retrospective devoted to this socially motivated artist. Weems has long been acclaimed as one of the most eloquent and respected interpreters of African American experiences, and she continues to be an important influence for many young artists today. Featuring more than 120 works—primarily photographs, but also texts, videos, and an audio recording—as well as a range of related educational programs, this comprehensive survey offers an opportunity to experience the full breadth of the artist’s oeuvre and gain new insight into her practice.

Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video

January 24–May 14, 2014

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City

http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/on-view/carrie-mae-weems-three-decades-of-photography-and-video

"Staring down issues of gender, family, and race, Weems has made a career of setting history's record straight.

This happened in Rome not long ago, in 2006—in the twenty-first century, in  other words. The influential but out-of-the-limelight artist Carrie Mae Weems  had received a prestigious fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, and not  only was she grateful to be in Italy and having the time of her life, she was  actually connecting the cultural dots, using the city as a backdrop to produce  some of her best work to date. One day, though, a past fellow—Weems won’t say  who—paid a visit to the academy’s villa atop Janiculum Hill and sputtered,  “Carrie Mae Weems, what—what are you doing here?”

Weems could have said that her work—based in photography, and about  African-American life, by all means, but obsessed too with gender, class, and  history—had as much right to a place at the academy as this woman’s, maybe more.  She could (and maybe should) have said, “What the fuck are you doing  here?” She thought about it. Instead, she let it go."

For thirty years, Carrie Mae Weems has made the art world confront issues of race, class, and gender. A new retrospective at the Guggenheim looks back at her thought-provoking work.

The Louvre (from "The Museum Series"), 2006–present.

"Most of us who have ever wandered the halls of an art museum have felt the uncanny power of experiencing a multitude of voices, visions, times and places, all speaking simultaneously through the works mounted on white walls. However, an unfortunate majority of these voices are dead, white and male. To this day, mainstream institutions exhibit a shocking majority of works from the DWEM (dead white European males) set, leaving a sweeping range of experiences and stories left unshared.

In "Museum Series," photographer and 2013 MacArthur Fellow Carrie Mae Weems casts a quizzical eye on the seemingly impervious Museum. The series depicts a variety of art institutions local and abroad, spanning everything from the Louvre and the Tate Modern to the Project Row Houses in Houston.

"Carrie Mae Weems: The Museum Series" is on view from January 30 until June 29, 2014 at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Weems’s mid-career retrospective is simultaneously on view at the Guggenheim Museum from January 24 to May 14, 2014."

http://www.studiomuseum.org/

http://www.guggenheim.org/

"Carrie Mae Weems' art tells the story of everyone and no one.

She looks at marginalized people who are no one to society: slaves, forgotten singers, artists who never graced the walls of a museum, women whom artists never wanted to paint. Then she'll turn around and create a series so personal that all viewers can relate: an intimate kitchen-table story of love found and lost.

Weems is often called a chronicler of the African-American experience, but her work is broader than that. Through photography, video and text, she deals with matters of race and gender in a way that is just as frequently described as universal.

A major retrospective of Weems' work, in the process of traveling the country, arrived last week at Stanford's Cantor Arts Center. About 100 photos, videos and installations will fill the large downstairs gallery through Jan. 5 before heading to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City."

Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video

Cantor Arts Center, through Januari 5, 2014.

http://museum.stanford.edu/news_room/weems.html