At the McMullen: Weems exhibit casts a harsh yet cleansing light on racial tensions

BOSTON - Carrie Mae Weems’ art kicks viewers in the gut, stirs their consciences and forces them to wonder how familiar images of non-white people have distorted the way they think about race.

An award-winning photographer who explores the power of imagery to shape perceptions, Weems is displaying more than 120 works in a profound and powerful exhibit at the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College.

Her exhibit, “Carrie Mae Weems: Strategies of Engagement,” transcends politics to offer art that casts a harsh yet cleansing light on racial tensions currently afflicting the U.S.

Museum Director Nancy Netzer called Weems “one of the most innovative and powerful artists in America” whose work “addresses the most pressing and complex problems in current minds.”

“We are pleased to invite audiences … to engage in myriad ways with the work of Carrie Mae Weems and to ponder the deeper questions she poses for contemporary society,” said Netzer, who is also a professor of art history at Boston College.

Born in Portland, Oregon, Weems has pursued eclectic interests throughout her 30-year career from dance to street theater and union activism. After receiving her first camera as a gift in her 20s, she focused on photography while expanding its range to include text, spoken word, video and audio to explore complex aspects of African-American life.

Weems was named Photographer of the Year in 2005 by The Friends of Photography and was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” Fellowship in 2013.

Organized by Boston College English professor Robin Lydenberg and art history faculty member Ash Anderson, the work on display reveals Weems’ success in creating art in varied media including photography, installations, fabric, audio, text, digital images and video.

In a joint statement they said the exhibit “invites viewers to engage mentally, emotionally, and physically with (Weems) passion for truth, her commitment to change and her belief in the power of beauty, endurance and grace as the foundation of our humanity.”

As designed by Diana Larsen, the museum's assistant director, the exhibit immerses visitors in Weems’ art in ways that suggest a passage through history affected by images that distort African-American history and promote racial stereotypes.

“This was one of the few times I’d worked with a living artist to design an exhibit,” said Larsen, who is in charge of exhibition design, curatorial affairs and collections management. “Carrie Mae Weems was very gracious in helping with planning. I’m gratified we accomplished what we set out to do.”

Passing through installations culled from earlier projects, visitors will encounter images of African-Americans that Weems has appropriated and recast with superimposed text to prod them into examining their own attitudes about race.

Leading a tour of the exhibit with Anderson, Lydenberg told visitors Weems sought to engage them in “an intense way” by presenting images that explore “the relationship between history and the present.”

The first section, “Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment,” features photos Weems staged with students from Savannah College of Art and Design to reenact familiar images of assassinations and violent events from the 1960s that she felt caused Americans to lose hope in the country’s future.

Weems’ art invites visitors to consider how public images shaped their own reactions to historic events in ways that still affect their present attitudes.

Passing into the next section, visitors will be confronted by striking photos from two exhibits, “The Hampton Project” and “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried,” hanging on fabric banners from the ceiling and framed on the wall that offer a powerful indictment of the misuse of public images.

Weems’ art in these sections provides her strongest indictment of the insidious power of images to subtly reinforce racial stereotypes.

Visitors will see jarring juxtapositions of photos from 1900 of African-American and Indian students at Hampton Union Institute in Virginia, who were, said Anderson, subject to “a program of forced assimilation” to help them succeed in white society.

In one photo, nine Native Americans with braided hair in tribal dress gaze proudly into the camera. It is paired with another image, which shows the same group with short hair in Western suits staring like mannequins at the viewer.

Taken by photojournalist Frances Johnson, the photos, superimposed on muslin fabric banners, portray students as educators expected them to be to meet white expectations. Yet, they appear frozen in posed tableaux and cut off from their cultural origins.

Visitors must ask: Who decides what culture suits these non-white students. Isn’t this forced cultural assimilation a form of servitude?

The most emotionally powerful installation in the exhibit, “From Here I Saw…,” features daguerreotypes commissioned in 1850 by Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz to support his theory of the racial inferiority of Africans. Weems has appropriated the images and reproduced them in red-tinted prints overlaid with text that give the subjects a frank, ironic voice, protesting how their images were misused to promote racial stereotypes.

The next installation, “The Louisiana Project (Missing Links),” reveals Weems creating empowering art that turns the tables on an 1873 Mardi Gras parade in which racists misused Darwin’s “Origin of Species” to belittle black achievement.

Weems transforms the ugliness of that event into gorgeous self-portraits of herself in a black suit, wearing a series of animal masks, including a donkey, elephant and zebra, personifying “Justice,” “Happiness” and “Despair.”

Lydenberg observed that by creating thought-provoking art in response to racist propagandizing Weems “takes it over and controls it by defying that stereotype.”

In the third-floor Monan gallery, Weems is showing some of her earliest work from 1988 and most recent in 2016.

The earlier work includes Weems satirizing then-prevalent stereotypes of black women in self-portraits in which she dresses as “Peaches, Liz, Tanika and Elaine,” in her words, “to push against it, to insist there is another kind of read.”

In her most recent work, “All The Boys,” and “Usual Suspects,” Weems responds to multiple police killings of black men with photos of African-American men in dark clothes in misty settings suggesting, perhaps, the way police perceive them as anonymous threats, more like targets than humans.

Describing this work and the public reaction to the murder of nine church-goers in Charleston, South Carolina, Weems wrote, “We are continuing to ask for our humanity to be recognized.”

Through her honest, extraordinary art, Weems has revealed that humanity and exposed the distorted images that obscure it.

“Carrie Mae Weems: Strategies of Engagement”

WHEN: Through Dec. 13

WHERE: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2101 Commonwealth Ave., Boston

ADMISSION: Free

INFO: 617-552-8587; artmuseum@bc.edu