When Carrie Mae Weems was 21 she received a prophetic gift from her boyfriend—a camera. At the time, she was a union organizer for the labor movement, a student of modern dance, and the mother of a five-year-old girl. Weems began using the camera as a means of documenting labor activism in California, but soon discovered a passion beyond political organization. Weems lived between both coasts in the mid–70s, and in New York became acquainted with a community of photographers and artists at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Inspired, she embarked on a series of multimedia projects, often autobiographical, that examined internalized racism in America, women’s roles in family and in society, and the exclusion of Black women from popular media spaces. The Barbican exhibition covers the artist’s 30-year career, and includes the acclaimed photographic series “The Kitchen Table” (1990) and the film installation The Shape of Things (2021).
—Paulina Prosnitz