Essays and interviews explore the work of Carrie Mae Weems and its place in the history of photography, African American art, and contemporary art. In this October Files volume, essays and interviews explore the work of the influential American artist Carrie Mae Weems--her invention and originality, the formal dimensions of her practice, and her importance to the history of photography and contemporary art. Since the 1980s, Weems (b. 1953) has challenged the status of the black female body within the complex social fabric of American society. Her photographic work, film, and performance investigate spaces that range from the American kitchen table to the nineteenth-century world of historically black Hampton University to the ancient landscapes of Rome. These texts consider the underpinnings of photographic history in Weems's work, focusing on such early works as The Kitchen Table series; Weems's engagement with photographic archives, historical spaces, and the conceptual legacy of art history; and the relationship between her work and its institutional venues. The book makes clear not only the importance of Weems's work but also the necessity for an expanded set of concerns in contemporary art--one in which race does not restrict a discussion of aesthetics, as it has in the past, robbing black artists of a full consideration of their work. Contributors Dawoud Bey, Jennifer Blessing, Kimberly Juanita Brown, Huey Copeland, Erina Duganne, Kimberly Drew, Coco Fusco, Thelma Golden, Katori Hall, Robin Kelsey, Thomas J. Lax, Sarah Lewis, Jeremy McCarter, Yxta Maya Murray, Jos Rivera, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Salamishah Tillet, Deborah Willis

Prepared on the occasion of the exhibition held at the Williams College Museum of Art, March 4-Oct. 22, 2000.

The articles in this book illustrate the important connections between art, identity, and social formations that disciplines like anthropology and ethnomusicology have long taken for granted. These case studies emphasize the importance of artistic practices and forms within diaspora formations in particular and within social and political movements more generally. The contributors, coming from different disciplinary backgrounds, shed a unique light on the specific potentials of the different arts to create and represent diasporic subjectivities upon which the very existence of diasporas depend. -- Amazon.com.

Publisher description

"Artists, Critics, Context is an anthology of readings on American art and culture that begins in the 1940s with Abstract Expressionism and the Cold War and ends in the 1990s with the ubiquity of video installations and the broad cultural changes arising from technological developments in telecommunications and biotechnology."--Preface pg. ix.

Profiles seventy-six American photographers, both well known and more obscure, who have made significant contributions to the field of photography throughout the twentieth century.