Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems
Carrie Mae Weems in 2013
Born	(1953-04-20) April 20, 1953 (age 63) Portland, Oregon, USA
Nationality	American
Education	BA, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. MFA, University of California, San Diego
Known for	Photography
Awards	MacArthur Fellowship (2013), Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2007), Skowhegan Medal for Photography (2007), Rome Prize Fellowship (2006), Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in Photography (2002), College Art Association Distinguished Feminist Award (2016), National Artist Award Honoree by the Anderson Ranch Arts Center (2016)

Carrie Mae Weems (born April 20, 1953) is an American artist who works with text, fabric, audio, digital images, and installation video but is best known for her work in the field of photography. Her award-winning photographs, films, and videos have been displayed in over 50 exhibitions in the United States and abroad and focus on serious issues that face African Americans today, such as racism, sexism, politics, and personal identity.

She has said, "Let me say that my primary concern in art, as in politics, is with the status and place of Afro-Americans in our country." More recently however, she expressed that “Black experience is not really the main point; rather, complex, dimensional, human experience and social inclusion ... is the real point.”

Weems was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1953, the second of seven children to Carrie Polk and Myrlie Weems. She began participating in dance and street theater in 1965. At the age of 16 she gave birth to her first and only child, a daughter named Faith C. Weems. Later that year she moved out of her parent's home and soon relocated to San Francisco to study modern dance with Anna Halprin at a workshop Halprin had started with several other dancers, as well as the artists John Cage and Robert Morris. She decided to continue her arts schooling and attended the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, graduating at the age of 28 with her B.A. She received her MFA from the University of California, San Diego. Weems also participated in the folklore graduate program at the University of California, Berkeley.

While in her early twenties, Carrie Mae Weems was politically active in the labor movement as a union organizer. Her first camera, which she received as a birthday gift, was used for this work before being used for artistic purposes. She was inspired to pursue photography after she came across The Black Photography Annual, a book of images by African-American photographers including Shawn Walker, Beuford Smith, Anthony Barboza, Ming Smith, Adger Cowans, and Roy DeCarava, who Weems found inspiring. This led her to New York City, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she began to meet other artists and photographers such as Coreen Simpson and Frank Stewart, and they began to form a community. In 1976 Weems took a photography class at the Museum taught by Dawoud Bey. She returned to San Francisco, but lived bi-coastally and was involved with the Studio Museum and a community of photographers in New York.