CHICAGO, IL.- Logan Center Exhibitions at the University of Chicago is presenting Carrie Mae Weems: A Land of Broken Dreams in partnership with the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago as part of the multi-site exhibition Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40.

On view July 17–December 12, 2021, Carrie Mae Weems: A Land of Broken Dreams features an array of media and objects—photography, video, texts, bric-a-brac, and furniture—through which Weems reimagines the Black Panther Party’s programs for young people in Chicago during the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the main gallery, visitors are invited to browse, sit, and explore a classroom setting replete with desks, chairs, books, a blackboard, View-Masters, and posters of historic Black leaders. A smaller gallery, designed to resemble a theater, will screen video works by Weems as a meditation on Black identity and its fraught history in America, offering a space in which to process sustained histories of conflict in our contemporary lives.

Running online in parallel to the on-site exhibition, a dedicated website featuring video content, an interview, a video tour, and other digital materials supports viewer engagement from afar. Visitors are invited to attend the opening reception on Saturday, July 17, 12-4pm with a timed-ticket through the University of Chicago Box Office.

“Weems’s presentation asks viewers to question universal equity and justice against the backdrop of a variety of media engaging the intersection of race and education and the construction of identity and legacy. Weems reminds us that what we teach our children matters. We can offer them stereotypes, we can offer them untruths, but they ultimately become what they become in part due to what we offer them,” said Leigh Fagin, Senior Director of Programming and Engagement at the Logan Center.

Additionally, a robust programming calendar, which will be announced late summer 2021, is being planned in collaboration with the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture and Logan Center Community Arts at the University of Chicago, and will feature a film screening and conversations around Black radical pedagogy.

Carrie Mae Weems: A Land of Broken Dreams is presented by Logan Center Exhibitions in collaboration with the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago and is curated by Abigail Winograd, MacArthur Fellows Program Fortieth Anniversary Exhibition Curator; with Alyssa Brubaker, Exhibitions Manager; and Leigh Fagin, Senior Director of Programming and Engagement.




Through image and text, film and performance, and her many convenings with individuals across a multitude of disciplines, Carrie Mae Weems has created a complex body of work that centers on her overarching commitment to helping us better understand our present moment by examining our collective past.

Weems has received numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including a MacArthur Award; a US Department of State Medal of Arts; a Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome; a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, among many others. Major solo exhibitions of Weems’s work include Carrie Mae Weems: The Museum Series, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2014), and Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video, Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville (2013–14; traveled to: Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University; Guggenheim Museum, New York).

Her work is in public and private collections around the world, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Weems is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. She lives in Syracuse, New York, with her husband, Jeffrey Hoone, who is executive director of Light Work.