Yaniya Lee: Your projects are often in conversation with and influenced by other people’s work. Weems will also present an artist talk on Saturday, May 4, at the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.

This year, Weems is the featured artist at the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival in Toronto and will present an exhibition in five parts: “ Heave ” at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, “ Blending the Blues ” at the CONTACT Gallery, and the public installations “ Scenes & Take ,” “ Anointed ” and “ Slow Fade to Black ” across the city. Her most notable works include The Kitchen Table Series (1980) and From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–96). Since the early 1980s, and her first monograph “Family Pictures and Stories,” Weems has expanded these same themes of power and relationality in texts, videos, installations and theatre. The West coast native moved to New York in the 1970s, where she took a class at the Studio Museum in Harlem with Dawoud Bey and met a community of like-minded artists. This theme resonates throughout her longstanding practice in relation to history, to work, to family and to how we relate to one another. Positioning her body within and against these looming backdrops, she shows how such architectures not only exert, but reinforce power.

In her 2006 series of photographic self-portraits Roaming Carrie Mae Weems stands in the midst of the monumental structures and landscapes of Rome, Italy.

Artwork carrie mae weems