In 2013 Weems received the MacArthur “Genius” grant as well as the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2012, Weems was presented with one of the first US Department of State’s Medals of Arts in recognition for her commitment to the State Department’s Art in Embassies program. Weems has received numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including the prestigious Prix de Roma, The National Endowment of the Arts, The Herb-Alpert, The Anonymous Was a Woman, and The Tiffany Awards. Weems seems to suggest most poignantly that we cannot rise to the challenges of our times without confronting the realities of our past. While much of the work is set within the United States, it is easy to see comparisons with the political and social realities and disruptions of Europe and beyond. Initiated by the Park Avenue Armory in New York City in 2021, The Shape of Things takes a new and expanded form in LUMA Arles. This monumental series of installations continues LUMA Arles’s commitment to producing complex exhibitions by today’s most compelling artists. With cinematic and special effect techniques drawn from earlier times, such as dioramas, side-shows, and a Pepper’s Ghost, The Shape of Things is an incisive, powerfully emotional and critical reflection on subjects both deeply embedded in American culture and history and the explosive events of recent years. The Shape of Things encompasses and reveals consistent themes and methods harnessed in Weems’s larger body of work. Her work provokes a double bind between the viewer and the subject, often with uncomfortable and disquieting results. The content of her ongoing project is to understand, to tease out of the image, the conditions of living. Her work shifts between interrogating found images, and generating new staged photography and film. Determined as ever to enter the picture - both literally and metaphorically - Weems has sustained an ongoing dialogue within contemporary discourse, investigating what she, in a nod to the Black American poet and scholar, Amiri Baraka, calls “the changing same”.ĭuring this time, Carrie Mae Weems has developed a complex body of work employing photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and video.

Carrie mae