Traveling Exhibitions

Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of photography and video

“My responsibility as an artist is to work, to sing for my supper, to make art, beautiful and powerful, that adds and reveals; to beautify the mess of a messy world, to heal the sick and feed the helpless; to shout bravely from the rooftops and storm barricaded doors and voice the specificity of our historical moment.”
—Carrie Mae Weems

In keeping with this passionate commitment to improving the human condition through her art, Carrie Mae Weems has produced a broad trove of intellectually challenging and aesthetically compelling work that addresses issues of race, gender, and class and places her at the forefront of contemporary art.  Indeed, Holland Cotter of The New York Times recently stated, “No American photographer of the last quarter century … has turned out a more probing, varied, and moving body of work.”  Yet to date there has not been a major museum survey devoted to this critically and socially engaged artist.  The Frist Center for the Visual Arts, in Nashville, Tennessee, is pleased to be organizing a retrospective exhibition composed of approximately 150 photographs, videos, and installations from more than twenty-five series created over the last three decades.  The works will come from major collecting institutions, private collections, and the artist’s own holdings.

Carrie Mae Weems was introduced to photography in the late 1970s after working as a professional modern dancer and grassroots political activist in California.  She was attracted to the medium because of its ability to give tangible, visual form to abstract political and social theories, particularly those related to African American experiences.  Weems is also a poetic storyteller; powerful written or spoken-word narratives often accompany her images.  In her earliest work, the artist looked to her own life and family as case studies for exploring contemporary African American identity.  Weems’s narrative soon broadened to more general aspects of the African Diaspora, from the legacy of slavery to the perpetuation of both debilitating stereotypes and nourishing folk traditions.  A desire to more deeply examine the underlying causes and effects of social injustice spurred Weems to explore the histories of Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean, as well as the southeastern United States.  Weems continues to question race, gender, and class restrictions, yet she often moves beyond the specific to address cross-cultural humanitarian struggles against empowerment and oppression.  An element of universality is present throughout Weems’s work: while African Americans are typically the primary subjects, she wants “people of color to stand for the human multitudes” and for her work to resonate with audiences of all races.

Exhibition Catalogue:
An illustrated exhibition catalogue will be published in conjunction with the show by Yale University Press with scholarly essays by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Professor and Director, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University; Franklin Sirmans, Curator of Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Dr. Deborah Willis, Professor of Photography and Imaging, New York University; and Katie Delmez, Curator, Frist Center for the Visual Arts.

Exhibition Schedule:
Frist Center for the Visual Arts: September 21, 2012–January 13, 2013
Portland Art Museum: February–May 2013
Cleveland Museum of Art: June–September 2013
Guggenheim Museum: September 2013–January 2014

Contact Information:
Katie Delmez, Curator
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615-744-3245

Creation Story: Gee’s Bend Quilts and the Art of Thornton Dial

Creation Story: Gee’s Bend Quilts and the Art of Thornton Dial explores parallels and intersections in the works of these acclaimed Alabama artists. In the tradition of African American cemetery constructions and yard art, the quilters of Gee’s Bend and the artist Thornton Dial harness the tactile properties and symbolic associations of cast-off materials to create an art of profound beauty and evocative power. Though produced against a backdrop of poverty and racism, the appeal of these artworks crosses aesthetic, social, and geographical boundaries, earning widespread recognition as being among the most compelling art of our time.

The quilters of Gee’s Bend, a small rural community near Selma, Alabama, utilize salvaged fabric in orchestrations of strong colors, dynamic patterns, and eccentric geometric shapes. While drawing from classic traditions of American quiltmaking, their sensitivity to the evocative power of materials and fine balance of optical tension and harmony marks their quilts as truly original; the New York Times calls them “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.”

Going beyond the beauty and tactile appeal of the Gee’s Bend quilting tradition, the densely layered assemblages of Thornton Dial are, in his words, “about ideas, and about life, and the experiences of the world.” A keen observer and interpreter of his times, Dial uses the technique of bricolage—the aesthetic reconfiguring of found objects—to reflect upon personal memories, insights into root causes of racism and poverty, and news events and programs he sees on television. In a review of the exhibition Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial, at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Wall Street Journal calls Dial’s works “tough, beautiful, disturbing, seductive, improvisatory, unignorable, fierce, exhilarating, ambiguous—and much more.” While Dial’s brand of symbolic realism contrasts with the abstraction of the Gee’s Bend quilters, the artists are linked by an appreciation for the poetic and evidentiary power of raw materials, which they transform into expressions of beauty and truth.

Creation Story: Gee’s Bend Quilts and the Art of Thornton Dial is drawn from the extensive collection of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation in Atlanta, Georgia. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Paul Arnett, curator of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation collection, and Joanne Cubbs, independent curator and curator of Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial. Arnett will consider formal, historical, and environmental connections between the urban-oriented work of Dial and the rural experiences of the Gee’s Bend quilters, especially Mary Lee Bendolph, whose remarkable life epitomizes the spirit of the Gee’s Bend community. Cubbs will explore the philosophical and critical underpinnings relating to the use of found materials in both Dial’s art and the quilts of Gee’s Bend. Her essay will address subjects such as memorialization, trauma, the abject, reclamation, and the rhetoric of redemption.

Creation Story: Gee’s Bend Quilts and the Art of Thornton Dial will be presented at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts from May 25 through September 3, 2012. The exhibition will be available to other museums beginning fall 2012.

Contact Information:
Mark Scala, Chief Curator
615-744-3336
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Image: Mary Lee Bendolph. "Housetop" Variation, 1998 (quilted by Essie Bendolph Pettway in 2000). Cotton corduroy, twill, polyester; 72 x 76 in. Collection of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Photography by Pitkin Studio