Carrie Mae Weems

Responding to a 2015 article on the status of women in contemporary art, Carrie Mae Weems concluded that in order to resist the splintering of social movements into competing interest groups, “we need a narrative change. We need a new set of terms.” This miniretrospective of her work from the mid-1990s to the present has a lot going on but pays particular attention to her strategies of narration and staging across her many series. The play between image and caption explored most famously in “Kitchen Table Series,” 1990, is certainly the most well known of these strategies. On the entry ramp into the galleries, a mirror reflection of Weems, nude and perched on the edge of the bed, asks us to “imagine my fate had De Kooning gotten hold of me.” A large part of the show is dedicated to Western conventions of beauty and juxtaposes the conceptually flattened space of the modernist canvas with the reality of black female bodies as they are seen and unseen by modern masters. In an especially moving part of the installation, pages of a children’s coloring book about the Obamas face off against a video of two silhouetted women telling racist jokes and a video of Obama’s face altered to conform to the contradictory caricatures made of him during the 2008 and 2012 election cycles. Weems’s search for a narrative change is a search for a more humanizing and unifying language but also one that does not efface the dehumanizing language of the recent past and its unsettling persistence in our culture.