Meet the Artist: Carrie Mae Weems
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Take a contemplative look into artist Carrie Mae Weems’s upstate New York studio as she discusses the ideas we carry throughout our lives, how she grapples with injustice, and the resolve and compassion she is bringing to her next phase in life and as an artist. Her immersive multimedia installation Lincoln, Lonnie, and Me—A Story in 5 Parts and photographs from her series Constructing History are part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s permanent collection.
This project received Federal support from the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative Pool, administered by the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum.
That's really sort of important to me, you know, because I have a lot of stuff.
I'm working on this project trying to concentrate on notions of resistance. And so I've been thinking about this a lot, and that in some way, it speaks profoundly to the work that I've been doing for a really long time. We carry the things that matter with us through the course of our lives. And the things that matter to us actually emerge very early.
So, these ideas about injustice emerged for me when I was about 11, 12 years old. You carry these ideas, and what you're trying to do at any given moment is to discover how to speak about the thing that is most important to us that we carry through our lives. Part of the job of the artist is to pay attention to what's being said to you, what's being told to you. And then using all of that so that you can actually get out of the way of the work and do the work that the work needs.
That is the way that "Lincoln, Lonnie and Me" emerged. A part of the story that I wanted to tell are the things that we hold onto that continue to haunt us. And so using this early hologram technology of a Pepper's ghost, sort of marries again this broad social history with also a very intimate and personal history. A woman aging, struggling to get into her bunny outfit, long past due. I think is really an extraordinary commentary on the moment. So I'm really happy that the Smithsonian has really taken it upon themselves to acquire this work and to bring it into the collection. It is the deepest honor, to have the work there and to have it seen in the context of the nation, in the context of some of the greatest artists of our time.
I'm looking forward to the next 10 years of my life. I'm looking forward to being a mature artist who is still grappling, I think, with very important questions. I know that I will be living with injustice for the rest of my life. There is no relief in the deepest way, but there is resolve. And the resolve is to push for change, and to figure out the ways that it needs, again, to be articulated at this moment. Sometimes harshly, sometimes with joy, sometimes with laughter, sometimes with terror and tears, and sometimes with magic.
But that is the thing that continues to drive me, this determination that I have a right to speak out against injustice and the way that it harms us all. And I think that my gift is the gift of compassion, is the gift of generosity. It's the gift of saying, whether you despise me or not, I still offer you the complexity of your humanity. And I am willing to work with you to be my brother's keeper, so that I can push beyond the narrowness of my constraints into the fullness of my own humanity. That is the work ahead. So yeah, these are the small things that I think about late at night, lying in my bed, wondering why I can't go to sleep. Why can't I sleep?