CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/1/2023

Black History Month Staff Pick: 'Carrie Mae Weems: A Great Turn in the Possible'

Featured spreads are from A Great Turn in the Possible, the beautifully produced catalog to the artist's recent 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 and the perfect start to our celebration of books that honor Black History. Weems "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," Elvira Dyangani Ose writes. "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."