AMSTERDAM.- The Stedelijk and Rijksmuseum have acquired a selection of photographs by the renowned American artist Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1953). They come from the 2021 series Painting the Town, which she made in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests in her home city of Portland. Weems intertwines personal narratives with social issues such as power relations, emancipation, inequality and discrimination. The Painting the Town series is on view at the Rijksmuseum from 7 February to 9 June 2025.


Experience the powerful and poignant art of Carrie Mae Weems! Explore her iconic photographs and multimedia works that challenge perceptions and explore themes of identity, race, and social justice. Browse this selection of Weems books and buy your copy today.


Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam has bought Painting the Town #2. This acquisition was made possible by Leferink family and the Mondriaan Fund.

The Rijksmuseum has bought Painting the Town #3 and Painting the Town #4. This acquisition was made possible by the Friends’ Lottery (VriendenLoterij) and the Women of the Rijksmuseum Fund.

It has been a long-standing wish of the Stedelijk to acquire work by Carrie Mae Weems, and this purchase at last sees the fulfilment of that wish. It also further establishes the new course of the museum’s photography collection, through which we highlight the dissolving boundaries between photography and art more than previously. Weems’s photograph looks like a painting, and it is only upon very close examination that it becomes identifiable as a photograph. It thereby serves as a powerful metaphor for this ongoing development in art. –Rein Wolfs, Director of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

We are thrilled that the Stedelijk and the Rijksmuseum have been able to acquire photographs by Carrie Mae Weems. We will be showing the Weems series Painting the Town concurrently with the major exhibition American Photography. Weems has a critical eye, and her poetic and monumental photographs offer incisive perspectives on contemporary American society. –Taco Dibbits, Director of the Rijksmuseum

PAINTING THE TOWN

At first glance Weems’s photographs of boarded-up storefronts resemble abstract paintings. But these images are less abstract than they seem. During the Black Lives Matter protests, activists wrote slogans on the boards that storeowners had used as a precautionary measure, and the city authorities ordered that these texts be painted over. Weems became fascinated by the unintended consequence of this act, through which censorship resulted in painterly compositions. The beauty of the photographs is beguiling, but the series as a whole also constitutes a commentary on the precarious state of freedom of expression and on the history of abstract painting, one in which black and female artists were long overlooked.

CARRIE MAE WEEMS

Through her work, Carrie Mae Weems focuses on social issues such as racism, sexism and discrimination to explore what it means to be both a witness to history and a participant in it. Her work has been shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Barbican Art Gallery, London; Tate Modern, London; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and Fundación MAPFRE, Barcelona. Weems has received countless awards, including the prestigious Hasselblad Award in 2023. President Biden presented Weems with the National Medal of Arts in 2024.


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