NEW YORK, NY.- Gladstone announced its representation of contemporary American artist, Carrie Mae Weems. The gallery will present its first solo exhibition of her work in New York during the fall of 2024.
Carrie Mae Weems is celebrated internationally for her groundbreaking and highly distinctive practice comprising photography, text, audio, installation, video, and performance spanning the past four decades. Her incisive and influential multidisciplinary work invites sustained contemplation of race, gender, social injustice, and economic inequity throughout American history to the present day. Guided by her experiences as a Black woman, Weems is a poignant storyteller whose work simultaneously constructs narratives that bear witness to complex, painful histories and searches for new, nuanced models to live by.
In welcoming Carrie Mae Weems to the gallery, Barbara Gladstone stated, “The opportunity to work with Carrie Mae Weems at this point in her trajectory is a great honor. Her conceptually driven, aesthetically powerful work is unflinching in its call for social justice and equity. She has been profoundly influential as both an artist and a teacher on a generation of artists, and we look forward to bringing her art to a wide public.”
On this news, Gavin Brown expressed, “Weems is an artistic, cultural, and social force whose incredible body of work has catalyzed essential public discourse and continues to inspire artists to join her in tackling the most tenacious issues of our times. Her work remains ever-prescient as it continues to evolve, and we are excited to be her partner and advocate as she charts her future course.”
Recent prominent solo exhibitions include Looking Forward, Looking Back, Smithsonian Art Museum, Washington, D.C. (2023); Varying Shades of Brown, Brown University, Providence; The Evidence of Things Not Seen, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, Germany (2022), traveled to Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (2023); The Shape of Things, LUMA, Arles, France (2023); Lincoln, Lonnie and Me, MACBA, Barcelona, Spain (2022); A Great Turn In The Possible, kBR Mapfre Foto Colectania, and MACBA, Barcelona, Spain (2022); and The Shape of Things, Park Avenue Armory, New York (2021). Weems’s work is in major public collections including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; Tate Modern, London, among many others.
Carrie Mae Weems has also been the recipient of many awards and fellowships including a MacArthur Foundation Award and the Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts, Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, Washington, D.C. (both 2013); the WEB Dubois Award from Harvard University (2015); the Hasselblad Award (2023); National Artist Honoree, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Aspen, (2016). She has had a longstanding commitment to education, having taught at numerous colleges and universities, and received honorary doctorates from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA (2022) and Smith College, North Hampton, MA (2011) alongside honorary degrees from California College of the Arts, Colgate University, Bowdoin College, the School of Visual Art, and Syracuse University. Weems is currently the first-ever Artist in Residence at Syracuse University, New York.
Carrie Mae Weems was born in Portland, Oregon in 1953. As a young adult, she lived bicoastally, concurrently training as a dancer in San Francisco while exploring photography at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Through studying in New York, she was inspired by and connected with leading Black photographers, including Roy DeCarava and artists from the Kamoinge Workshop. In 1984, Weems enrolled in U.C. Berkeley's graduate program in folklore studies where the beginnings of a career-long interest in subjectivity and storytelling was born. Weems translated ideas surrounding autobiography into her photographic work of the early 1990s in which she captured the tension between acting as both subject and object, performer and director.
