The celebrated photographer Carrie Mae Weems has joined Gladstone Gallery, which has locations in New York, Brussels, and Seoul. With her new representation, Weems will depart New York’s Jack Shainman Gallery, which has shown her art for the past 15 years.
Gladstone’s first exhibition with Weems will take place in the fall of next year at one of its New York spaces. She joins a roster that includes Sarah Lucas, Wangechi Mutu, Alex Katz, Shirin Neshat, Arthur Jafa, and many others.
A representative for Gladstone said that the gallery’s representation of Weems would be exclusive in New York. Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco and Galerie Barbara Thumm in Berlin will continue to represent her.
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“The opportunity to work with Carrie Mae Weems at this point in her trajectory is a great honor,” Barbara Gladstone, founder of Gladstone Gallery, said in a statement. “Her conceptually driven, aesthetically powerful work is unflinching in its call for social justice and equity. She has been profoundly influential as both an artist and a teacher on a generation of artists, and we look forward to bringing her art to a wide public.”
Weems’s most famous works are the photographs in her “Kitchen Table Series” of the 1990s, in which the artist herself appears in a dimly lit kitchen alongside Black men, women, and children. These works question how identity is constructed, highlighting Weems’s actions in them as performances that appear to be done specifically for the camera.
Since the ’90s, Weems’s art has taken a variety of forms, from photographic installations to a film made using the pepper’s ghost technique, in which images are projected such that they appear to be three-dimensional. Her focus has included anti-Black caricatures, intersections of Blackness and femininity, and the harmful legacy of past racist violence.
Her work is currently on view in New York at the Guggenheim Museum in the exhibition “Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility.”
Gladstone partner Gavin Brown called Weems “an artistic, cultural, and social force whose incredible body of work has catalyzed essential public discourse and continues to inspire artists to join her in tackling the most tenacious issues of our times.”