Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems is one of the most influential contemporary American artists, a photographer and multimedia artist whose work examines race, gender, class, and power with unflinching clarity and extraordinary beauty. Her landmark series The Kitchen Table Series, in which she placed herself at the center of domestic scenes that unfold around a single kitchen table, redefined what photography could say about Black womanhood, intimacy, and the politics of everyday life.

Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1953, Weems studied at the California Institute of the Arts and the University of California, San Diego. Her early work explored Black identity and community through documentary photography, but she quickly moved beyond documentation into conceptual and narrative art. Series like From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried — in which she rephotographed 19th-century daguerreotypes of enslaved people through a red filter — challenged viewers to confront how photography itself has been used as a tool of racial oppression.

Weems has exhibited at the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art, the Frist Center, and galleries worldwide. She received the MacArthur Fellowship in 2013, and in 2014 became the first Black woman to have a solo retrospective at the Guggenheim. Her work hangs in the collections of major museums across the globe, and her influence on contemporary art — particularly on how artists of color engage with history, identity, and visual culture — is incalculable.