Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems talked about her work today at the Portland Art Museum, and I was there, sitting in the dark, watching and listening, one of seven hundred people who preferred being there to watching a football game or taking a nap on a Sunday afternoon. Her work is a combination of photography, text, and her own rich, deep, no-nonsense spoken voice. In the gallery you see her visual art and you hear her voice; you see her video and film which she directs and sometimes shoots herself, and you hear her voice; you see hanging curtains with her pictures printed on them, curtains you walk among so that you become part of the work; and you hear her voice. Photography is not allowed in the exhibition, but non-flash photography was permitted during her talk, which is how I got this image of the projection screen mounted to the right of her podium. Most of her work is posed, metaphorical, symbolic. She is the subject, but it is not self-portraiture because in the work she is not herself but a metaphor for all our selves, especially the selves whose bodies might, in some way, look like hers.

Her work asks who is outside and who is inside, who looks and who is looked at, who is an object and who is a subject, who is respected for their work and who is little known or unknown. She is a character in her own photographs: she, the photographer, is the looker and the looked-at. Today inside the museum she showed us pictures of herself outside other museums. She is making a tour, she and her work. She will end up inside the Guggenheim in New York.

I sat in the dark, moved to tears, thinking about artists whose work is not inside museums, whose work will never be honored. I thought of Vivian Maier. I thought of all the poor, unsung, self-doubting artists I know, myself among them, who don't make it. I thought about the young man I met yesterday, sleeping in the street and dreaming of being a model in another time. I thought of outsiders and insiders. I sobbed as quietly as I could.

A very intelligent article about Weems and her work is here.