1953-present
Works in the Collection
Biography
Carrie Mae Weems was born in Portland, Oregon in 1953. When she was 16, she relocated to San Francisco to study modern dance. She earned a B.A. from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego. Weems also studied in the Graduate Program in Folklore at the University of California, Berkeley from 1984 to 1987. Weems moved to New York City, and while she began to engage with the local arts community, she took a photography class with Dawoud Bey. By 1983, she had completed Family Pictures and Stories, a collection of photographs, text, and spoken word. She continued to make and exhibit her work will teaching photography at Hampshire College.
In 2005, she received the Distinguished Photographer’s Award, and in 2013, she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City mounted a 30-year retrospective exhibition of her work in 2014, and she was granted an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Syracuse University in 2017. Weem’s work can be found in numerous collections including those of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and The Tate Modern, London.