Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter, FOMU, Antwerp 

Across a career that spans five decades, Carrie Mae Weems has charted a singularly influential and inspiring path, anchored in the personal but with universal impact. The Heart of the Matter is the first exhibition to center her as muse, as model, and as moral compass. Weems has noted:

I discovered that I was the reference point, and the point of view, pointing the viewer toward the likes of me in history. Later, I understood this photographic self to be a muse and a guide into the unknown. Miraculously, the muse evolved out of my resistance to photographing people without permission, and in the process, I discovered an entirely new way of working and indeed discovered myself. Praise God.

Weems repeatedly returns to the self as subject, although she is more than a leitmotif in the work presented here: she is its organizing principle. Whether standing with her back turned to counter edifices of cultural and ideological power, or facing the camera to navigate complex territories of domestic life, Weems uses her likeness to probe the thorniest societal questions. From the earliest days of her practice, Weems has considered her subjectivity as an expansive construct. Nurtured through projects that combine family portraits with first-person narratives, she demonstrates that the personal is a vital means to address and dismantle inequality. She also suggests her presence more diffusely through her disembodied voice and broad legacies of the transatlantic slave trade. Presented for the first time is Preach (2024), an immersive installation that connects Weems’s spirituality with the history and vitality of Black worship in the United States.

This exhibition eschews a chronological structure in favor of a framework that centers Weems as a creative form. She asks us to confront urgent political events and persistent social cycles, while her perspective, experiences, and ethics serve as a guide and a call to align with our own convictions.

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. 

The Heart of the Matter, curated by Sarah Hermanson Meister, is a project by Gallerie d’Italia, museum of Intesa Sanpaolo, in collaboration with Aperture. Aperture exhibitions are supported by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc.