CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/22/2016

Carrie Mae Weems: Kitchen Table Series

"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."