Table of Biography
Carrie Mae Weems is an artist working in text, fabric, audio, digital images, and installation video from the United States. Carrie Mae Weems rose to prominence through her early 1990s photographic project The Kitchen Table Series.
Early Life
Carrie Mae Weems was born in Portland, Oregon, the United States, on the 20th of April 1953. She has a birth sign of Taurus and is currently 70 years old as of 2024. In addition, she belongs to the African-American ethnicity and holds American nationality.
She is the second child of her parent Carrie Polk and Myrlie Weems. She was raised along with her six siblings whose names are yet unknown in the media. In 1965, she started participating in dance and street theatre.
Meanwhile, she gave birth to her only child a daughter named Faith C. Weems when she was just 16 years old. In 1970, she left her parent’s home and moved to San Francisco.
Carrie Mae Weems – Education
Talking about his academics, she completed her BA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia at 28 years old. Later, she earned a master’s degree from the University of California, San Diego. Additionally, she is involved in the folklore graduate program at the University of California, Berkeley.
Professional Career
In her early twenties, Carrie Mae Weems started working in the labor movement. As a union organizer, she was politically active. Moreover, he decided to pursue a profession in photography after being inspired by The Black Photography Annual.
In her early works, her images explored personal and familial themes and often were accompanied by text and audio recordings. “The Kitchen Table Series” (1990), a narrative cycle of staged pictures depicting seemingly routine moments from a woman’s life within the space of her kitchen, is considered her major work.
Caption: Carrie Mae Weems discussing The Kitchen Table Series (Source: Britannica)
Moreover, her latter notable works in the black-robed figure that floats through the cityscapes of the series “Roaming” (2006) and “Museums” (2006) and later through the sets of the television series “Scenes & Takes” (2016). In the early 1990s, she embraced video technology, though the still image remained central in her work.
Her work was exhibited frequently and is represented in such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City; the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Los Angeles; and Tate Modern, in London.
2015 to present
She became the first Black woman to have a retrospective (“Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video”) at the Guggenheim Museum, in New York City, in the year 2014. Meanwhile, she was also named a MacArthur Foundation fellow in 2013.
“People of a Darker Hue” (2017) and “Imagine If This Were You (2017),” are her short films works which consider police brutality against African Americans and violence within Black communities.
She also teaches photography at several colleges, including Syracuse University in New York, where she began a three-year residency in 2020. “Social Studies 101” an artist collective was founded by Weems along with Deb Willis, Dawoud Bey, and Lonnie Graham.
In Syracuse, it launched “Operation Activate” (2011), an anti-violence campaign that includes billboards, posters, and matchbooks with slogans such as “A man does not become a man by killing another man.”
The Institute of Sound and Style, a creative mentorship program, was founded in 2012. The collective also launched the public art campaign Resist COVID Take 6! (2020) to honor vital workers during the COVID-19 epidemic and to raise attention to the virus’s disproportionate impact on Black, brown, and Indigenous populations.
Carrie Mae Weems – Awards
Weems was named Photographer of the Year by the Friends of Photography. In 2007, she was awarded the Anonymous Was A Woman Award. Moreover, she won the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award and MacArthur Fellow, “Genius” Award, both in 2013.
Caption: Carrie Mae Weems Honored at Museum of Modern Art, UC San Diego, Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (Source: carriemaeweems.net)
In 2014, she won the BET Visual Arts Award and the Lucie Award. She earned the ICP Spotlights Award from the International Center of Photography and the Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow in the year 2015. In 2020, she was indicated in the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum, and in 2023, she was awarded the Hasselblad Award.
Net Worth 2024
As of 2024, Weems’s net worth is estimated at around $1 million and earned handsome money from her successful career. In addition, her exact salary, earnings, and assets details are yet unknown.
Relationship Status
In 1995, Carrie Mae Weems married to Jeffrey Hoone. Her husband is an Executive Director of Light Work by profession. With the marriage, the couple has a child named Faith C. Weems. Meanwhile, the family resides in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and Syracuse, New York.
Caption: Carrie Mae with her husband (Source: Oregon Live)
Until recently, the artist has never been involved in any contentious topic or gossip. She has certainly maintained her profile.
Body Measurements
This beautiful artist has a pair of black eyes with black curly hair color. Moreover, this 70-year-old woman has maintained her body fit and balanced body weight but never revealed her exact height, weight, and other physical.
Social Media
Weems is an active personality on social media. On her Instagram page ‘@carriemaeweems’ there are over 62.5k followers. Likewise, there are over 3.5k followers on her Twitter and over 6.9k followers on her Facebook page.