In collaboration with Intesa Sanpaolo and the Gallerie d’Italia, Aperture presents Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of Matter. Tracing a spiritual and personal journey through the career of acclaimed American artist Carrie Mae Weems, this retrospective shares Weems’s distinctive approach to addressing history, representation, and injustice through the lens of race, gender, and class.
Often centering herself as a historical reference point, guide, or muse, Weems photography is deeply rooted in places often excluded from historical narratives: artist’s studios, plantations in the American South, domestic spaces, and the “invisible institutions” born of violence and oppression that sheltered African-American worship, juxtaposed against images of monuments and museums that have been historic sites of exclusion.
Featuring over 75 photographs and three video installations drawn from the artist’s most well-known bodies of work, the exhibition will also debut an ambitious and powerful installation exploring religion and spirituality that has been commissioned specifically for this project. The exhibition is accompanied by a monograph copublished by Aperture and Allemandi. Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of Matter is curated by Sarah Meister, Executive Director, Aperture.
Carrie Mae Weems (born in Portland, Oregon, 1953) is a widely influential artist whose work gives a voice to people whose stories have been silenced or ignored. Over the course of forty years, she has built an acclaimed body of work using photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and video. Her work is in collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Tate Modern, London.
Sarah Hermanson Meister is executive director at Aperture. She worked in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, for more than twenty-five years, where she curated acclaimed exhibitions on the work of Josef Albers, Brazilian modernist photographers, Dorothea Lange, and many more.
Image credit: Carrie Mae Weems, Road Sign, 1991–92; from Leave Now! Credit: © Carrie Mae Weems and reproduced courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin.
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