2015: Carrie Mae Weems, “Melding Art and Justice: Slides from ‘From Here I Saw What Happened and Cried’”

Carrie Mae Weems, “Melding Art and Justice: Slides from ‘From Here I Saw What Happened and Cried’”

Strauch-Mosse Visiting Artist Lecture Series at Lesley University
https://mosselectures.wisc.edu/boston/

Thursday, 1 October 2015, 19:00 EST

Carrie Mae Weems delivers talk “Melding Art and Justice: Slides from ‘From Here I Saw What Happened and Cried’”
Carrie Mae Weems delivers talk “Melding Art and Justice: Slides from ‘From Here I Saw What Happened and Cried’”
Weems-poster-front

Sponsored by:
Global Mosse Lecture Series
The Mosse Foundation
Lesley University

Marran Theater
34 Mellen Street
Cambridge, MA 02138

Moderator: Richard Zauft
Introduction: Isabella Herrera

“You are the ones who are coming behind me,” Weems told Lesley students, “and you are the ones who will make the world a different place through the ways you express yourself.”
“You are the ones who are coming behind me,” Weems told Lesley students, “and you are the ones who will make the world a different place through the ways you express yourself.”
(from left) Dean Richard Zauft, photography chair Christine Collines, Dean Emeritus Stan Trecker, Carrie Mae Weems, and professor Oscar Palacio.
(from left) Dean Richard Zauft, photography chair Christine Collines, Dean Emeritus Stan Trecker, Carrie Mae Weems, and professor Oscar Palacio.
Lesley University President Joseph Moore (left) and Dean Emeritus Stan Trecker speak with Carrie Mae Weems.
Lesley University President Joseph Moore (left) and Dean Emeritus Stan Trecker speak with Carrie Mae Weems.
Hans Strauch, Darisse Paquette, Carrie Mae Weems, Richard Zauft
Hans Strauch, Darisse Paquette, Carrie Mae Weems
Darisse Paquette, Board of Trustees Vice Chairman Hans Strauch, Carrie Mae Weems, President Joseph Moore and his wife, Beth Chiquoine.
Darisse Paquette, Board of Trustees Vice Chairman Hans Strauch, Carrie Mae Weems, President Joseph Moore and his wife, Beth Chiquoine.
Lesley University College of Art and Design Dean Richard Zauft
Lesley University College of Art and Design Dean Richard Zauft
Carrie Mae Weems audience
Carrie Mae Weems audience
Lesley University College of Art and Design student Isabella Herrera
Lesley University College of Art and Design student Isabella Herrera
Student Isabella Herrera, a senior photography major, hailed Weems as an inspiration to young artists during her introduction.
Student Isabella Herrera, a senior photography major, hailed Weems as an inspiration to young artists during her introduction.
Carrie Mae Weems
Carrie Mae Weems
Carrie Mae Weems
Carrie Mae Weems
Lesley University Dean Emeritus Stan Trecker (right) led a Q&A session at the conclusion of Weems’s lecture.
Lesley University Dean Emeritus Stan Trecker (right) led a Q&A session at the conclusion of Weems’s lecture.

Lesley University story on Carrie Mae Weems’s lecture:

Carrie Mae Weems Melds Art and Justice

Her audience gazed in rapt attention as artist Carrie Mae Weems showed slides from her exhibition, “From Here I Saw What Happened And I Cried,” a series of nineteenth-century photographs of slaves that she superimposed with text, a project commissioned by the Getty Museum.

“Making that work was very interesting,” she noted emphatically. (View the project here.)

Art doesn’t necessarily provide answers, but it allows the artist and viewer to ask certain kinds of questions and resolve “aspects and notions of the truth,” she said. The pursuit of the truth and exploration of power, racism, sexism and class are all part of the common thread that runs through Weems’s vast, acclaimed oeuvre.

“It’s all the same project really: The exploration of social justice,” she said.

The influential American artist drew a packed audience to Lesley’s Washburn Auditorium on Thursday evening, where she reflected on her 30-year career and her process of making art. She has exhibited in major museums around the world, and won a 2013 MacArthur “Genius” grant and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award, among many other recognitions.

“I wake up very early in the morning, and I try to battle through a set of ideas that I think are all very much relational,” said Weems.

She spoke directly to students in the audience, including those studying at the Lesley University College of Art and Design, and called on young artists to push through the pain of the human experience and make work that is important and true to them.

“You are the ones who are coming behind me,” said Weems, “and you are the ones who will make the world a different place through the ways you express yourself.”

Weems said she is always reading, watching and observing the work of other artists, writers, musicians and performers, from Toni Morrison to Leo Tolstoy. She is influenced by her fellow artists who are also grappling with the “truth and messiness of our lives” and trying to clarify it.

“Keep reading,” she urged. “Spend time with the arts that matter to you.

“Nothing springs just solely from you,” she continued. “We are all informed, all responding to deep structures in the world around us and to other artists.”

Weems creates artwork that is textured and has “odor,” not pristine and sterile.

“Texture allows you to get close to meaning,” she explained. “Think of your work as archiving your ideas,” said Weems.

During her presentation, she highlighted photographs and images from many of her projects, including works that explore themes of history and racism. She explores an American society which is “in the midst of this profound change that I think in some instances is very scary,” asserting that we are dealing now with consequences of colonization, victimization, and the assassinations of the 1960s, including Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John and Robert Kennedy.

“And when I’m not so completely overwhelmed by it, I think about gardens,” she said with a laugh, shifting gears to some of her more lighthearted and fun projects, such as photographs for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) for a book to celebrate its sculpture garden.

“I went to (MoMA’s) archive, dug around, and found photos taken in the garden much earlier, in the 60s and 70s. Then I invited a whole bunch of people to the gardens to restage things. It was hilarious,” she recalled with a laugh.

Lesley College of Art and Design Dean Richard Zauft praised Weems’s courage as an artist during his welcome address to the audience, and student Isabella Herrera, a senior photography major, hailed Weems as an inspiration to young artists during her introduction.

“She shows us as young artists that our work is yet capable of affecting social change, even in a seemingly stagnant and indifferent climate,” Herrera said.

“We are now living for the most part in a majority-minority state and certainly will be in next 15 years,” said Weems. “This is huge, really important. It’s going to change the face of the nation, and how we respond to is as sophisticated, intelligent people is going to matter a great deal.”

Weems’s visit as part of the Strauch-Mosse Visiting Artist Lecture Series is supported by the Strauch-Mosse Endowed Fund for Visiting Artists, established in 2009 by Lesley University trustee Hans D. Strauch through a $1 million gift. The foundation and its associated lecture series reflect the university’s commitment to cultural and artistic literacy, a bedrock of a democratic society.

Cambridge Day article on Carrie Mae Weems lecture, reposted with permission from Marc Levy:

Carrie Mae Weems, Cambridge Day
Carrie Mae Weems, Cambridge Day

Lesley University hosts photographer and multimedia artist Carrie Mae Weems on Thursday as the latest presenter in its free Strauch-Mosse Visiting Artist Lecture Series.

The much-honored Weems – she was a MacArthur “Genius” grant winner in 2013, has a Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award and is set to receive the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal of Honor from Harvard University this fall – has been described by The New York Times as “one of the more interesting artists working in the gap between art and politics” and “a superb image maker and a moral force.”

Her more than three decades of work, featured at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon Guggenheim Museum and other museums around the world, explores topics including racism, family relationships, cultural identity, sexism, social and economic class and the consequences of power.

Lesley University Dean Emeritus Stan Trecker described it as “a complex body of art addressing important social themes and employing photographs, text, fabric, installation and video” with Weems “often inserting herself into the image.”

Weems’ lecture is at 7 p.m., Thursday in Lesley University’s Washburn Auditorium, 10 Phillips Place, near Harvard Square. Information and reservations are here.

This post was written from a press release.

Carrie Mae Weems 01
Carrie Mae Weems is a widely influential American artist whose work gives voice to people whose stories have been silenced or ignored. Investigating history, identity, and power, she finds connections between personal experience and the larger structures and institutions that shape our lives. Over the course of forty years, she has built an acclaimed body of work using photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and video. Since the 1980s, Weems’s work has been seen around the world, and she has inspired a generation of artists with her poetic and original approach to storytelling. Throughout her career, Weems has exposed the belief systems that have maintained the status quo. In her iconic Kitchen Table Series, from 1990, Weems builds emotionally complex narratives through simply staged black and white photographs, casting herself in the role of lover, friend, mother, and solitary woman. The series depicts scenes that are both universal and specific to the Black lives they imagine. And 22 Million Very Tired and Very Angry People, 1989-1990, presents photographs of ordinary objects with captions that point to their use as tools for revolution. Bringing together these items with silk-screened banners of text, the piece addresses the power of collective action. With From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, 1995-96, Weems collects photographs of enslaved men and women and other Black subjects from museum and university archives. Pairing these images with powerful texts, Weems reveals the role photography has played in supporting and shaping racism.
https://www.carriemaeweems.net/biography
Richard Zauft designs and makes limited edition, handmade letterpress printed books with photography.
He has held various academic positions, concluding a 40-year career in higher education – most recently serving as Dean of the Lesley University College of Art and Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts until 2019. He served as the President of the College Book Arts Association and President of the Society of Printers in Boston. He organized the first national traveling exhibition of artists’ books and the first national exhibition of printed broadsides. He established the printing facility at the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum and launched their visiting artist residency program.
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