CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/8/2022

Comprehensive, gorgeous 'Carrie Mae Weems: A Great Turn in the Possible' releases this week!

Featured spreads are from Carrie Mae Weems: A Great Turn in the Possible, the beautifully produced catalog to the artist's current mid-career retrospective at Fundación MAPFRE in Barcelona. Presenting works from all of Weems' important series—from her early Family Pictures and Stories (1978–84) to her seminal Kitchen Table Series (1990) to her very recent Seat or Stand and Speak (2021)—this is the most comprehensive survey of Weems’ genre-defying oeuvre yet published. "Weems can be considered a public intellectual for her decision to operate within and outside of a disciplinary framework," Elvira Dyangani Ose writes, "addressing the world from the affirmation of the African American experience in a praxis organized around the production of a knowledge directed at transforming the social contexts in which we live and operate, and outside of academia. This modus operandi is central to Weems’s oeuvre, which has always been prompted by her drive to rescue untold stories and their protagonists from oblivion into the public sphere, and to subvert the powers that marginalized or silenced those stories and their agents in the first place. Like [Toni] Morrison, Weems encourages herself and others to take ownership of their narratives and, especially on behalf of and for subjects like herself—women, working-class and Black—to articulate and reimagine the accounts of lives that have never been sufficiently valued or narrated with the esteem and rigor that the artist would have wanted; or not sufficiently, anyway, to offer the guarantee of once and for all destroying the racial prejudices so heavily rooted in the United States’ sociopolitical psyche and popular imaginary."