Weems has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at major national and international museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frist Center for Visual Art, the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Spain. Weems has received numerous awards and honors, including the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, the Rome Prize, the U.S. Department of State Inaugural Medal of Arts, BET Honors Visual Artist Award, and W.E.B. Du Bois Medal from Harvard University. She is represented in public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; MoMA, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; MOCA, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Tate Modern, London. Weems resides in Syracuse and Brooklyn, New York. She is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery.

THE OFFICE produces a variety of Weems’ projects, which include her multi-artist, multi-disciplinary performance works Grace Notes: Reflections for Now (premiered Spoleto Festival USA, 2016) and Slow Fade to Black with Geri Allen (premiered BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival 2012); Resist Covid Take 6, her COVID-19 public awareness project; The Future Is Now and I Am It: A Parade to Mark the Moment at the opening festival of the REACH at the Kennedy Center; and unique, expansive gatherings like Carrie Mae Weems LIVE: Past Tense / Future Perfect, a two-day series of presentations, performances, and conversations with artists, activists, curators and others held in association with her 2014 career retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. 

Carrie Mae Weems website

RESIST COVID TAKE 6

Resist Covid Take 6 was an artist-driven public awareness campaign to educate and enlighten Black, Brown, and Native American communities on the impact of this deadly virus on their lives. Because of the higher number of deaths in these communities, the awareness campaign used creative measures and projects to emphasize preventative steps that had to be taken to ensure these community members’ safety, and reinforce the necessity of social distancing along with other preventative measures and dispel harmful falsehoods about Covid-19. We accomplished our goal through billboards, creative messaging, public art projects, and other creative means to highlight the staggering death toll by Covid-19. Through these efforts we underscored the importance of social distancing, alert the general public, encourage public discussion, dispel the myths and dangers of false cures associated with the virus, and finally thanked our front line and essential workers.

Carrie Mae Weems TAKE SIX initiative began in May 2020 and ran continuously until Fall 2021.

CLICK HERE for the recap of the campaign.

THE FUTURE IS NOW AND I AM IT: A PARADE TO MARK THE MOMENT

Commissioned by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

To open the REACH, the Kennedy Center gathered artists from far-flung corners of the artistic landscape together with young people to walk, march, and dance into the future in this parade curated by multi-disciplinary visual and performance artist Carrie Mae Weems. Under Carrie’s artistic leadership, other collaborators included David Ross of the MusicianShip who served as Artistic Director, along with The Griggs Brothers, Marlon Taylor-Wiles and Andrew Ondrejcak as Costume Consultants. Daniel Pinha was Float Designer and Sandra Atkinson served as Parade Director.

A selection of the performers involved were Lubana Al-Quntar, Hall Williams Band, Kazaxe, Ladygod, Soka Tribe, Mariachi El Rey, LeeAnet Noble & Team Vicious, Eastern High School Drumline, and The President’s Own Marine Band. With many guest artists such as Nona Hendryx, Andrew Ondrejcak, The Griggs Brothers, Marlon Taylor-Wiles, Laura Anderson Barbata, Sheldon Scott, Stephanie Mercedes, Vanessa German, Hoesy Corona, Carlos Nazario, and others.

2019 Kennedy Center, Washington DC

Click HERE for more information on the REACH Opening Festival 2019.

GRACE NOTES: REFLECTIONS FOR NOW

Originally conceived as a response to President Obama’s singing of “Amazing Grace” during his eulogy for Emanuel AME Church victim Reverend Clementa Pinckney, Grace Notes: Reflections for Now brings together a cast of extraordinary artists from different disciplines, among them composer/musician Craig Harris, composer James Newton, poet Aja Monet, writer and theatre artist Carl Hancock Rux, dancer Francesca Harper, and singers Alicia Hall Moran, Imani Uzuri, and Eisa Davis. Weems shapes an immersive experience from these elements, with herself at the center and her arresting video and photography as a framework. In a performance that is indelibly linked to this time of civic unrest, its escalating violence, and the bizarre political rise of Trump, Weems asks and explores complicated questions about the meaning of grace and its role in the pursuit of democracy.

2017 Kennedy Center, Washington DC
2016 2016 Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven, CT | Spoleto Festival USA, Charleston, SC

PAST TENSE

As Billie Holiday sings: The same ole story, but it’s new to me....

Using music, text, projection, and video, Past Tense is a performance/lecture that takes audiences on a deep dive into the enduring significance of Sophocles’ iconic Antigone and her profound relevance to our contemporary moment. Featuring singers Eisa Davis, Alicia Hall Moran, and Imani Uzuri, and musicians Hamiet Bluiett, Graham Haynes, Yayoi Ikawa, and Juliette Jones, Past Tense’s origins lie in Weems’ powerful work Grace Notes. Weems says, “While working on Grace Notes for months it occurred to me that I was telling the story of Antigone, wherein an innocent man dies by unjustified means and his sister fights for the right to bury him honorably. But the wider community refuses her; her right to justice, and to peace, is denied.” Past Tense premiered on the opening night of the Onassis Festival NY 2016 at the Onassis Cultural Center NewYork.

2019 UMS, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI | Center for the Art of Performance, UCLA, Los Angeles CA | Grace Farms, New Canaan, CT
2018 Miami Dade College, Miami FL
2016 Onassis Festival, NYC