Carrie Mae Weems has often confronted the uncomfortable truths of racism and race relations over the course of her nearly forty-year career. In The Shape of Things, she focuses her unflinching gaze at what she describes as the circuslike quality of contemporary American political life. For this new work, Weems created a seven-part film projected onto a Cyclorama—a panoramic-style cylindrical screen that dates to the 19th century—where she addresses the turmoil of current events in the United States and the “long march forward.” Drawing upon news and television footage from the Civil Rights era to the present day, elements of some of her previous films such as The Madding Crowd (2017), in which intellectuals such as James Baldwin discuss contemporary politics, and new film projects that bring us into our tumultuous present, the films in The Shape of Things combine documentary directness with poetic rhythm to create an enveloping experience. The films are narrated by Weems, and the layering of her resonant voice with these densely woven images articulate the dangerous and mounting resistance to the “browning of America.” Former President Donald J. Trump is the implicit grand master of the American circus, with its associated tea parties, alt-right parades, and big lie assaults, all working furiously to combat the fundamental shifts in power that loom. But as Weems shows in these powerful works, America is irreversibly changed and changing. It can’t and won’t go back.
Books
Carrie Mae Weems: The Shape of Things
Foreword by Tom Eccles
Interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist
Essays by Thomas J. Lax and Huey Copeland
$60.00
Clothbound
6.5 x 9.25 inches
224 pages
100 color illustrations
ISBN: 9781735762999
Additional information
| Weight | 2.5 lbs |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 9.25 × 6.5 × 1.25 in |
About the Authors
Carrie Mae Weems is considered one of the most influential contemporary American artists. In a career spanning over 30 years, she has investigated family relationships, cultural identity, sexism, class, political systems and the consequences of power. Weems’ complex body of art employs photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and video. Weems has received numerous awards, grants and fellowships, including the prestigious MacArthur "Genius" grant and the Prix de Roma. She is represented in public and private collections around the world, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Tom Eccles is the Executive Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York, and the founding director of the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, where he has organized exhibitions and curatorial projects with artists including Rachel Harrison, Leigh Ledare, Haim Steinbach, and Amy Sillman. From 1995 to 2005, Eccles was director of the Publica Art Fund in New York City. He has been the Visual Arts Curator for the Park Avenue Armory in New York City since 2009, where he has curated exhibitions by Ernest Neto, Paul McCarthy, Phillippe Parreno, Ai Weiwei, Hito Steyerl, Nick Cave, and others.
Hans Ulrich Obrist is Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries, London. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. In 2014 he curated the Swiss Pavilion at the 14th International Architecture Biennale in Venice, where he presented Lucius Burckhardt and Cedric Price—A stroll through a fun palace. In 2011 Obrist received the CCS Bard Award for Curatorial Excellence, in 2009 he was made Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), and in 2015 he received the International Folkwang Prize for his commitment to the arts. Obrist has lectured internationally at academic and art institutions and is a contributing editor to several magazines and journals.
Thomas J. Lax is a curator, writer and scholar specializing in black art and performance. Recent exhibitions they have organized include Just Above Midtown: 1974 to the Present with Lilia Rocio Taboada and Linda Goode Bryant, and Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done with Ana Janevski and Martha Joseph, both at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. They contribute to publications including Prospect New Orleans, Artforum, October, The Nation, T Magazine and Vanity Fair, among others. They were the inaugural recipient of the Cisneros Research Grant for curators at MoMA, traveling to Brazil in 2020 to research contemporary black art. Also in 2020, they received the Noah Davis Prize from The Underground Museum in Los Angeles along with Candice Hopkins and Jamillah James.
Huey Copeland is a professor of art history at the University of Pennsylvania. His work investigates African/Diasporic, American, and European artistic praxis from the late eighteenth century to the present, with an emphasis on articulations of blackness in western visual culture. He is the author of over fifty publications and is an editor at October and contributing editor at Artforum. Most recently he edited Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World with Steven Nelson (Yale, 2023). He was appointed the Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. from 2020 to 2022. He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the David C. Driskell Prize in African American Art and Art History, awarded by the High Museum of Art in 2019.
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