Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter, Monograph Features New Series and Accompanies Major Exhibition Opening April 17 in Turin

New York, April 17, 2025—Aperture presents Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter, an illuminating new publication that brings critical insight into the mind and eye of the renowned American artist. Tracing a spiritual and personal journey through Weems’s career, this book shares her distinctive approach to addressing history, representation, and injustice through the lens of race, gender, and class, while centering Weems as a historical reference point, guide, or muse.

Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter accompanies a related exhibition at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin, part of Intesa Sanpaolo’s museum project, on view from April 17 through September 7, 2025. The exhibition is co-organized with Aperture and is curated by Sarah Meister, Executive Director, Aperture.

A comprehensive monograph spanning the arc of Weems’s career, The Heart of the Matter features generous presentations of landmark bodies of work, from her early projects, such as Family Pictures and Stories (1978–84), the landmark Kitchen Table Series (1990), and Museums (2006–ongoing); selections from more recent works, such as Scenes and Takes (2016) and Painting the Town (2021); and documentation of major video installations, including The Shape of Things (2021) and Leave Now! (2022). The book also debuts an ambitious and powerful series exploring religion and spirituality for Black Americans across generations, commissioned specifically for the exhibition and catalog. The ambition and vitality of this new series, Preach (2024), represented in the book by more than twenty new images and Weems’s original accompanying texts, celebrates the profound, passionate, and joyful forms of worship that typify Weems’s own experience of the Black Church, while also confronting the violence and oppression inextricably linked to this history.

In Meister’s introduction and throughout the book, the artist’s likeness, voice, family history, and spiritual journey offer a distinctive framework through which to approach her practice. Newly commissioned essays from esteemed scholars, including Drs. Erich Kessel, Megan Kincaid, and Tiana Reid; as well as Weems’s lifelong friend, the artist Dawoud Bey; and her husband, Jeffrey Hoone, complemented with shorter texts by a range of distinguished thinkers, underscore the singular value of Weems’s vision in grappling with the complexities and injustices of the world around us.

Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter is copublished by Aperture and Allemandi Editore and available at aperture.org/books.

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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.

Dawoud Bey, American artist and MacArthur Fellow, examines the Black past and present. His photographs and film installations engage the oft-disappeared histories of the Black presence in America. A major career retrospective of his work, An American Project, was organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2020–22). Bey’s many books include the Aperture titles Class Pictures (2007), Dawoud Bey on Photographing People and Communities (2019), and Elegy (2023).

Jeffrey Hoone is a working artist who was in a leadership position at Light Work in Syracuse, New York, from 1980 to 2021. He has written extensively on photography, served on peer-review panels for the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, and was awarded a photography fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has served on the board of the foundation Joy of Giving Something (JGS) for more than twenty-five years and is currently the president. JGS supports artist-run photography centers, arts organizations, and photography-education programs across the country.

Erich Kessel is an assistant professor of art history at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. His work engages the study of contemporary art and black critical theory. He is the coeditor of a collection of sketches titled An Excess of Quiet: Selected Sketches by Gustavo Ojeda, 1979–1989 (2020).

Megan Kincaid serves on the faculties of the Cooper Union and New York University. She has curated exhibitions of Chicane muralism, José Antonio Fernández-Muro, Cauleen Smith, and Frank Stella, among others, and has contributed scholarship to Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, Gagosian Quarterly, Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art, Vistas, and more.

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 of the work of Josef Albers, Bill Brandt, Brazilian modernist photographers, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, and many more.

Tiana Reid is an assistant professor in the Department of English at York University, Toronto. Her research and teaching interests include black literature, gender, and labor. Her writing has appeared in Aperture, Bookforum, Frieze, The Nation, and New York Review of Books, among other publications. She is an editor of Pinko magazine and a former editor of The New Inquiry. Her book of poems, Nightnursing, is forthcoming from icehouse, the imprint of Goose Lane Editions.

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About Aperture
Aperture is a nonprofit publisher that leads conversations around photography worldwide. From its base in New York, Aperture connects global audiences and supports artists through its acclaimed quarterly magazine, books, exhibitions, digital platforms, public programs, limited-edition prints, and awards. Established in 1952 to advance “creative thinking, significantly expressed in words and photographs,” Aperture champions photography’s vital role in nurturing curiosity and encouraging a more just, tolerant society.

Aperture’s programs and operations are made possible by the generosity of our board of trustees, our members, and other individuals, and with major support from 7G Foundation, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Charina Endowment Fund, Documentary Arts, Ford Foundation, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, Marta Heflin Foundation, Ishibashi Foundation, Joy of Giving Something, Anne Levy Charitable Trust, Henry Luce Foundation, Mailman Foundation, MurthyNAYAK Foundation, Grace Jones Richardson Trust, San Francisco Foundation, Thomas R. Schiff Foundation, Jane Smith Turner Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Stuart B. Cooper and R. L. Besson, Kate Cordsen and Denis O’Leary, Thomas and Susan Dunn, Agnes Gund, Michael Sonnenfeldt, Jon Stryker and Slobodan Randjelović, National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and New York State Council on the Arts, with support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

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Press contact:
Lauren Van Natten, publicity@aperture.org