Kitchen Table Series is the first publication dedicated solely to this early and important body of work by the American artist Carrie Mae Weems. The 20 photographs and 14 text panels that make up Kitchen Table Series tell a story of one woman’s life, as conducted in the intimate setting of her kitchen. The kitchen, one of the primary spaces of domesticity and the traditional domain of women, frames her story, revealing to us her relationships—with lovers, children, friends—and her own sense of self, in her varying projections of strength, vulnerability, aloofness, tenderness and solitude. As Weems describes it, this work of art depicts "the battle around the family ... monogamy ... and between the sexes." Weems herself is the protagonist of the series, though the woman she depicts is an archetype. Kitchen Table Series seeks to reposition and reimagine the possibility of women and the possibility of people of color, and has to do with, in the artist’s words, "unrequited love." Carrie Mae Weems (born 1953) 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.
Untitled (Man reading newspaper) (1990) is reproduced from Carrie Mae Weems: Kitchen Table Series.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Issue Magazine
Carrie Mae Weems: Kitchen Table Series renders a page-by-page account of a woman’s life within the intimate setting of her kitchen—a stage for female individuality, intricacy and strength.
T: The New York Times Style Magazine
Hilary Moss
In book form, Kitchen Table is more intimate… Unlike the experience of meandering through a museum, stepping back to appreciate the images and nearing the text panels to skim them, the pace of exploration is now in a person’s hands. [Weems] and Matsumoto spread out the series—and essays by the scholars Sarah Lewis and Adrienne Edwards—over 86 pages, supplying ample space to absorb it. Weems remarks, of Kitchen Table in particular, 'It has clearly touched the lives of a great many people. It touches a chord and speaks to something that’s fairly universal.' And, something that’s continuously fresh.
W Magazine
Stephanie Eckardt
[Weems's] Kitchen Table Series... [is] enduring, making its way into plenty of books and museums over the years. It’s now finally getting a stand-alone copy.
Vogue.com
Suzanne Shaheen
Selected for Vogue.com's Best Photo Books of Spring 2016
Musee Magazine
Liana DeMasi
Honest and raw, The Kitchen Table Series illustrates how we are all learning—from ourselves and each other—in our journey through this thing called life.
Lenny
Kimberly Drew
Long before the age of the selfie, Weems embarked on an unprecedented exploration of interiority. Very often her own subject, Weems produced work that is raw and personal and in many ways informs how we understand self-imaging even now.
AIGA Design Archives
Gail Anderson
So elegant and understated. The photos get to do the heavy lifting, but the design is gorgeous. (50 Covers of 2016)
American Photo
Jack Crager
…this is (surprisingly) the first book-length rendering of Weems’ seminal 1990 domestic study. The brevity of the project—20 images and 14 text panels—gives it room to breathe here, adding intensity to the stark self-portraits and mini-dramas and the startlingly frank prose.
Artblog
Andrea Kirsh
This exquisitely produced monograph presents the series by itself for the first time.
Laurie Simmons
"Carrie Mae’s photographs and videos take women as their central subjects and delve into their interiors, drawing out experiences of friendship, motherhood, memory and race in order to make visible the near invisibility and lack of understanding and documentation of the domestic lives of women, in particular women of color."
New York Times
Zoe Lescaze
"The art of Carrie Mae Weems is as subtle and sublimely elegant as it is uncompromisingly political... she is among the most radically innovative artists working today."
Called "perhaps our best contemporary photographer, [someone who] creates work that insists on the worth of black women—both in art and in life," in this weekend's New York Times T Magazine ("The Greats" issue), Carrie Mae Weems is best known for her 1989-90 Kitchen Table Series. It "made her career," Megan O’Grady writes, "and inspired a new generation of artists who had never before seen a woman of color looking confidently out at them from a museum wall, and for whom Weems’s work represented the first time an African-American woman could be seen reflecting her own experience and interiority in her art." continue to blog
"If Thelonious Monk is correct that a 'genius is he who is most himself,'" art historian Sarah Lewis writes in her Foreword to Damiani & Matsumoto Editions' gorgeous new book, Carrie Weems’s Kitchen Table Series "offers a visual and textual demonstration of this fact, and not merely because she extends the gendered notion of his insight. The work is not only an investigation of sovereignty—utter command of one’s self. It dexterously shows the artist’s mastery of every facet of her own form—her voice, her insights, her body, and a keen grasp of the constitutive networks and relations that make her who she is. 'At 38 she was beginning to feel the fullness of her woman self,' states the text in a panel of the series, Weems’s own age at the time. Over three decades later, the Kitchen Table Series has become a landmark not only for what it shows us about development, but what it shows about the artist’s own—Weems has long been the chronicler of how inner landscapes of longing shape our ability to function as a force in the world." continue to blog
Named one of Vogue magazine's Best Photo books of Spring 2016 and reviewed in W, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Issue and The New York Times, among many other major magazines and newspapers, Carrie Mae Weems: Kitchen Table Series is featured this week, alongside an excellent interview with the artist by Kimberly Drew, on Lenny. Topics range from Weems' time dancing with Anna Halprin, to the absurdity of counting on white men for representation in art, to our own ability to create meaning in our lives. continue to blog
Tuesday, February 6 at 12PM, the National Gallery of Art presents Carrie Mae Weems lecturing on her seminal "Kitchen Table Series," on view through May 18, 2018. Following the lecture, Weems will sign the Kitchen Table Series monograph, published by Damiani. continue to blog
Join us March 9-11 in Orlando! Our booth (28) features key course adoption titles as well as new and classic monographs and photobooks, influential surveys and exhibition catalogs, and photographers' writings. Radius photographers Mark Klett, Justin Kimball and Linda Foard Roberts will sign books in our booth. See below for details. continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 9.75 x 13.5 in. / 86 pgs / 34 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $50.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $67.5 ISBN: 9788862084628 PUBLISHER: Damiani/Matsumoto Editions AVAILABLE: 4/26/2016 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: NA LA
Published by Damiani/Matsumoto Editions. Text by Sarah Lewis, Adrienne Edwards.
Kitchen Table Series is the first publication dedicated solely to this early and important body of work by the American artist Carrie Mae Weems. The 20 photographs and 14 text panels that make up Kitchen Table Series tell a story of one woman’s life, as conducted in the intimate setting of her kitchen. The kitchen, one of the primary spaces of domesticity and the traditional domain of women, frames her story, revealing to us her relationships—with lovers, children, friends—and her own sense of self, in her varying projections of strength, vulnerability, aloofness, tenderness and solitude. As Weems describes it, this work of art depicts "the battle around the family ... monogamy ... and between the sexes." Weems herself is the protagonist of the series, though the woman she depicts is an archetype. Kitchen Table Series seeks to reposition and reimagine the possibility of women and the possibility of people of color, and has to do with, in the artist’s words, "unrequited love."
Carrie Mae Weems (born 1953) 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.
