BERLIN.- The exhibition “Painting the Town” presents a recent body of work by acclaimed African- American artist Carrie Mae Weems (*1953, Portland, OR, US), one of the most influential voices in contemporary art today. Weems created this series in 2021 , in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter protests across the United States. The resulting photographs transform the scars of civic unrest into powerful visual and political statements.
The title of the series borrows from the colloquial phrase “ to paint the town,” an expression typically associated with going out at night, celebration, and joy. Weems inverts this meaning with a twist of irony: here, “painting the town” refers instead to acts of erasure and silencing.
When the protests began, store owners from Weems’ hometown of Portland, Oregon, put up chipboard panels on their windows to protect their stores. These makeshift barriers became canvases for protesters to write slogans and graffiti. Authorities soon attempted to erase the messages by covering them with broad swathes of dark paint. What began as gestures of protection by local businesses, evolved into platforms of expression, only to be suppressed by local authorities who muted the cries for justice.
During a consequent visit shortly after the events, Weems strolled through the streets and encountered these painted- over surfaces. What remained were fields of black, gray, and muted tones that unexpectedly reminisced mid-20th century Abstract Expressionist paintings. Recognizing their aesthetic force and political charge, Weems photographed them with the precise light, framing, and perspective that distinguish her practice. The resulting images serve as a critique to violence and censorship, as documentation, and as appreciation of the beauty that can emerge from chaos.
By cropping out the surroundings of the paintings from the frame, Weems underscores the question of exclusion itself: what is allowed into the narrative, and what is forced out. Throughout her career, she has interrogated the politics of race, gender, and power in the United States. In this series, as in her broader practice, she challenges the erasure of Black artists and voices from dominant cultural histories. Her photographs serve as a reminder that, no matter the attempts at suppression, gestures of resistance can never be fully erased.
The works on view at Galerie Barbara Thumm were recently exhibited at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (February– June, 2024) in Weems’s first solo show in the Netherlands, accompanied by a public program and artist talk. The series has also featured in her solo exhibitions “Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter ” at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin (April– September, 2025); “Remember to Dream” at the CCS Bard Hessel Museum, US (June–December, 2024); and “Carrie Mae Weems: Reflections for Now” at the Barbican Centre, London (June–September, 2023), among others. Weems has held many solo and group exhibitions at institutions like Kunstmuseum Basel, the Völklinger Hütte, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, LUMA Foundation, Fondazione Prada, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Frist Center for Visual Art, and more. She has received numerous awards and fellowships, among them the MacArthur Fellowship and, most recently, the National Medal of Arts in 2024. Her work is held in major public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Tate Modern, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She lives and works in Syracuse, New York.
