Long before female empowerment became a nationwide rallying cry, the artist Carrie Mae Weems and the singer-songwriter Mary J. Blige
had their work cut out for them. Weems, who is now 64, first picked up a
camera at the age of 18 and over the decades has recast the ways in
which black women have been portrayed in images. Early on she realized
that she couldn’t count on others to make the pictures she wanted to
see. In her seminal work The Kitchen Table Series (1990), she
ruminates on race, class, and gender in an unfolding domestic story in
which she appears as the protagonist.
Shot in black and white, with
alternating images and panels of text, the series shows the artist at
her kitchen table, alone and with others, seated under a hanging lamp,
playing cards, chatting with female friends, and hugging a male partner.
Since
that career-defining project, Weems, who lives in Syracuse, New York,
has been honored with a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” a medal of
arts from the U.S. State Department, and numerous museum solo shows,
including a retrospective in 2014 at New York’s Guggenheim—the museum’s
first-ever survey of an African-American female artist. More recently,
in her 2016 series Scenes & Take, she photographed herself standing on the empty stage sets of such TV shows as Empire and Scandal, contemplating the cultural climate that gives rise to commanding black heroines onscreen.
In Mary J. Blige, the queen of hip-hop soul, best known for her raw,
openly autobiographical songs of empowerment, Weems found a towering
ally. Like Weems, the Bronx-born Blige, 46, is a storyteller, and also
began her career at 18, when she became the youngest female recording
artist to sign with Uptown Records. Her Puff Daddy–produced 1992 debut, What’s the 411?,
went multiplatinum, as did many of the hits that followed; so far she’s
won nine Grammys. Now she is generating Oscar buzz for her breakout
performance in director Dee Rees’s critically acclaimed Mudbound,
about two families in the Mississippi Delta during and after World War
II, divided by the racism of their Klan-addled community.
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