Carrie Mae Weems guest-edits Wallpaper*

Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1953, artist Carrie Mae Weems investigates traditional narratives woven into the structures of race, identity, gender and power. Early works, including the Kitchen Table series (1990), were celebrated for centring the experience of Black women. Others, appropriating daguerreotypes of enslaved people, tinting them red and adding etched text on glass, as in From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995-96), challenged racial representation and questioned the authority of those who write history. Confronting memory and emphasising the importance of a dialogue remain cornerstones of Weems’ practice today. In the October 2026 issue of Wallpaper* magazine, her curated guest edit is printed on unvarnished paper in a nod to Inserts (1988), Weems’ first collaborative effort. Here she highlights work – by herself and artists she admires – that celebrates monuments, mourning, meaning and memory.

The Weight of The Frame

On May Day 1998, the Whitney Museum of American Art, at the Philip Morris HQ on Park Avenue in New York, premiered an installation of a new series by Carrie Mae Weems. During the last 15 years, Weems’ works had been in more than 50 solo exhibitions organised by museums, including the J Paul Getty Museum, Museum of Modern Art, National Museum for Women in the Arts and Walker Art Center, among others, and some of her most celebrated body of works, including Colored People, From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, and the Kitchen Table series, had been featured.

To some, the installation mounted at the Whitney that spring, What What When Where, was a departure for the interdisciplinary artist whose work had focused on powerful images of Black identity. But with this work, Weems had created a commentary on class, power and social engagement, while also probing constructivism, one of the 20th century’s most influential art movements.

Curator Thomas Piché Jr wrote, ‘This installation addresses questions of class and social systems but offers no single or clear reading. It also explores Weems’ relationship to art history, part of an ongoing investigation that has so far touched on artists Robert Colescott, Frida Kahlo and Willem de Kooning, among others.’

With this series, she turns her eye on the Russian constructivists, the artistic arm of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and asks us to consider whether artistic social engagement can influence individual and social development. In this theatrical assemblage of digitally reproduced photographs, banners, neon signs, and large-scale freestanding sculptures, we are placed in a terrain of unexpected associations.’

Eight years after the Whitney Museum exhibition, Weems was awarded the 2005/2006 Joseph H Hazen Rome Prize fellowship. For the nine months of her residency at the American Academy in Rome, the artist photographed herself standing in the midst of monumental structures and landscapes in and around the city. Interviewed four years later for Art21, Weems described the catalyst for what would become her Roaming series. ‘I think that architecture, in its essence, much of the fabric of it, is very much about power. If we think about a place like Rome... what one is made to feel is the power of the state in relationship to the lower subject. You are always aware that you are... a minion in relationship to this enormous edifice. The edifice of power. What is this relationship of power to you? Right? And what is your relationship to power. And how do you try, I think, to make someone aware of it?’ noted Weems. ‘The public spaces are, of course, monumental, and they’re beautiful, and the edifices are extraordinary. But I’m not confused about what they’re supposed to mean, and what they’re supposed to do.’

In September 2012, ‘Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video’ opened at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee, spanning the 30 years since her 1983 survey at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC. The exhibition then travelled to the Portland Art Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, before ending at the Guggenheim in New York. It was the first time a Black woman had had a retrospective at the Guggenheim – and it was Weems’ first major exhibition at any New York City museum.

While at the Guggenheim, Weems presented a three-day event, co-hosting with poet and playwright Carl Hancock Rux. For this weekend of public programming, which included architecture, dance, film, literature, music, theatre and visual arts, Weems brought together what she called an ‘all-star cast’. The Guggenheim advertised the convening as a ‘multidisciplinary performance-salon focused on contemporary cultural production by people of colour’.

However, Thomas J Lax, curator of media and performance at MoMA, astutely observed, ‘Weems organised the event as a refusal to occupy this impossible position and stand in as The Only One. Instead, she brought the rest of us into the museum with her. Weems’ convening was an assembly of interdisciplinary makers that offered a shared opportunity to create a space where “form is mapped and levels of invention are simply unpacked”. Since then, she has organised these events in other august institutions, such as The Shape of Things at the Park Avenue Armory. She has also located these ensembles within self-made sanctuaries initiated by Black artists, including Theaster Gates and Eliza Myrie’s Black Artists Retreat in Chicago, and Julie Mehretu, Paul Pfeiffer and others’ pastoral Denniston Hill residency in upstate New York. While Weems’ exhibition at the Guggenheim may have been called a first, her emphasis on the convening positions it within a long history of collective self-institutionalisation that has occurred within the Black radical tradition.’

Keeping up with her long-standing practice of leading convenings, such as Land of Broken Dreams (in conjunction with The Shape of Things) and Artist Convening at Brown Arts Institute, Weems expanded her repertoire by staging performances, including Grace Notes: Reflections for Now and, most recently, Contested Sites of Memory. In June 2016, a year after nine worshippers were killed at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Weems debuted an original production.

Inspired by Greek tragedy Antigone, and blending live music, spoken word, dance and video, the performance investigates escalating racial tensions across the country. The performance’s title, Grace Notes, acknowledged Barack Obama’s eulogy for one of the victims, South Carolina state senator and pastor Clementa Pinckney, as well as the former president’s impromptu rendition of the Black gospel song, Amazing Grace.

‘The thing to me that is remarkable about our history, about who we are, about how we have conducted ourselves in the onslaught of history, is to maintain the core of our dignity,’ the artist commented in an Art21 interview. ‘That is really the ultimate call of grace.’

In 2024, Weems premiered Contested Sites of Memory, using the decommissioning of Confederate statues in Richmond, Virginia, as both a backdrop and focus. ‘I’ve been working around the idea of contested sites for several years now,’ she noted in an interview in Essence. ‘The performance is an opportunity to bring artists together and explore the complicated narratives surrounding monuments.’

Similar to a convening, the collaborators Weems brought together included performer Nona Hendryx, composer and trumpeter Jawwaad Taylor, band leader Craig Harris, Carl Hancock Rux, and poet and playwright Esther Armah, whose music, spoken word and vocals crystallise decades of reflection and conversation. In delivering one of the most personal and poignant moments of the performance, Weems told a story about her grandfather, Frank Weems, a tenant farmer and prominent union organiser in Arkansas, who fled to Chicago on foot after being almost beaten to death. Though he was later found alive, for years, his family and community assumed he was dead. Weems queried, ‘What happens to a man who has been celebrated in some way, but there is no monument built in his name?’ She later reprised Contested Sites of Memory at the Lincoln Center in New York, collaborating with pianist Vijay Iyer and violinist Jennifer Koh.

In 2023, Weems revisited her longtime engagement with monuments when she presented Monumental Concerns, a symposium, held at Syracuse University, exploring their role in society. There she asked, ‘How do we dialogue about these often-controversial issues and fairly address a multitude of perspectives? To what extent do we invite opposition to discussions of monument removal or displacement? When and how do these debates spill over into racial violence, and what can we do to address this reality? How do we acknowledge the emotional and nationalistic role that monuments often play while advocating for more inclusive historical framing?’

In addition to Weems, the university’s inaugural artist-in-residence at the time, the symposium brought together scholars such as Timur Hammond and Delali Kumavie, artists such as Eric Gottesman, Brandon Lazore and Hank Willis Thomas, and curators such as Hamza Walker and Melissa Yuen, along with other thinkers who explored how monuments can commemorate challenging histories and shape dominant narratives both locally and nationally. Weems also questioned what function monuments serve, suggesting they are both ‘vessel and container that can hold a certain kind of meaning, a certain kind of complexity’.

Two years later, in March 2025, she continued the Syracuse gathering with Monumental Concerns 2, a daylong symposium held at MoMA in New York. ‘As artists, we are all profoundly engaged in our mutual practices, yet the water gathers us into a single pool,’ Weems said. ‘I invite you to stand on the bridge as we consider contested sites of memory and monuments.’

As before, the symposium sought to consider the role of monuments and their contested histories in contemporary society. And again, the forum assembled artists, curators, historians and scholars, both to explore how monuments can commemorate challenging histories, and to shape dominant narratives both locally and beyond. The objective was to consider, through sustained thoughtful and respectful dialogue, what a monument is in 21st century America, and what monuments could be in the future.

Last year, commissioned by Italian banking group Intesa Sanpaolo, Weems premiered ‘Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter’, at the Gallerie d’Italia in Turin, an exhibition organised in collaboration with New York publisher Aperture and curated by Sarah Hermanson Meister. This retrospective included Kitchen Table, Museums, and Framing the Town, alongside video installations including The Shape of Things and Leave! Leave Now! But the heart of the exhibition was Preach, an intense installation exploring religion and spirituality among Black communities across generations.

To mark its last month, in April this year, the V&A East Museum in London commissioned a film, The Long Goodbye. In it, Weems ‘traces how bodies of water, from the sweeping currents to soft tides, have shaped us, enabling transatlantic migration and continuing to impact communities from east London and beyond’. And on Juneteenth (19 June), the US holiday marking the day when enslaved Black Texans learned of the Emancipation Proclamation that freed them, Weems’ commission for the Obama Presidential Center went on public view for the first time. Celebrating Obama’s historic 2008 election win, The Cool Blue Wind is a photographic installation comprising 30 images, alongside the Obama Suite, a 40-minute piece composed by Weems, which she performed with musicians Craig Harris, Vijay Iyer, Jennifer Koh, Somi, and Jawwaad Taylor.

For the project, Weems described herself ‘as bandleader, assembling musicians and photographic collaborators across time’. But this collage of monochromatic images, printed on silver metallic paper and tinted blue, also marked a departure for her. ‘I’ve incorporated not only my own [work], but also images created by some of the great photographers of our time,’ Weems said. ‘This serves as a way to commemorate the moment and pay tribute to those who have come before us. Their contributions have widened the path so future generations are more able to focus on the future with fewer obstacles.’

Creatively, Weems shows no signs slowing down. On 4 July – the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States – her nonprofit artist collective Social Studies 101 announced a new initiative, titled 250 and Change. Employing Monumental Concerns and Contested Sites of Memory as springboards, Weems put forth a sweeping proposal to commission 50 artists, in recognition of each of the states in the union, to create 50 original ‘monuments for a future’ they would want to envisage. For the next two years, their maquettes, sculptures, paintings, scale models and sketches will be displayed in containers designed by Elizabeth Diller, co-founder of architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, travelling across the entire country on an articulated lorry. Weems’ objective is to engage a wide, diverse and inclusive cross-section of the nation’s population. The exhibition will visit local cultural institutions, museums, universities and other public spaces, and every exhibition host will benefit from bespoke programming such as lectures, screenings and media campaigns.

‘One of the wonderful things that [American writer and civil rights activist] James Baldwin talked about is that the artist is here in order to illuminate those things that we most fear, the things that we are most ashamed of,’ Weems said in an interview with curator Madeline Haddon in April. ‘We have to bring an audience into a new awareness of who we are and what we are as human beings on the planet, and how we band together in order to achieve something greater.’