Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled #2451, 1990

The season premiere of the PBS series Art in the Twenty-first Century highlights the historically steeped recent work of MoCP collection artist Carrie Mae Weems. This episode, entitled "Compassion" (watch it!), features artists, like Weems, who “explore conscience; reconcile past & present; expose injustice; or express tolerance” through their compelling artworks.

Weems’s creative process generally involves an appropriation or carefully orchestrated reconstruction of old photographs, familiar images, sculptures and artifacts related to African American culture. These reconfigurations result in new works that comment on racism and difficult topics that are seldom addressed in mainstream media.

The segment opens with Weems’s narrative of a project involving an appropriation of photographs from the Harvard University art collection. Weems’s use of the images incited a legal (and moral, for Weems) battle with the University, which ended in the university’s ironic acquisition of Weems’s images for their collection.

Weems also details her close relationship with and desire to know and understand her family members, the process of storytelling, and the days she spent dancing with Anna Halprin.

Carrie Mae Weems, The First Major Blow, 2008 (Via Artnet)

As the segment reveals, Weems’s 2008 work reinvents press photographs from historical and political events, starring students as stand-ins in dramatically lit scenes. Of the creation and audience reactions to this work, Weems comments that the processes of thinking about and “looking at the sadness and history of the past 40 years” puts into context, and even creates, the mere possibility of Barack Obama’s run for the presidency.

PBS’s videographers were on-site for Weems’s latest work – new reconstructions of history related to the 2008 presidential election, John McCain, Sarah Palin, and Barack Obama. To her young student models, Weems carefully and emotionally instructs: “This not about you. We are using these bodies to talk about something that’s much bigger than we are.”

Stay tuned! Collection artist Cindy Sherman is the focus of a future episode, entitled "Transformation."

More Weems images in the MoCP collection.

Cao Fei, currently exhibiting in the MoCP Reversed Images show, also appears in the "Fantasy" episode.