Carrie Mae Weems Retrospective Opens at Frist in September

The first major museum retrospective devoted to contemporary artist and photographer Carrie Mae Weems - described as "one of today's most eloquent and respected interpreters of the African American experience" - opens on September 21, 2012, at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee. Some 225 photographs, installations, and videos, selected from more than fifteen museums and private collections, offer an unprecedented survey of Weems's thirty-year involvement with issues of race, gender, and class.

Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video remains on view at the Frist until January 13, 2013; it will then tour nationally to the Portland Art Museum, Oregon; the Cleveland Museum of Art; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City.

Comprehensive in scope, the exhibition traces the evolution of Weems's career from her early documentary and autobiographical photographic series to the more conceptual and philosophically complex works that have placed her in the forefront of contemporary art. Virtually all of the major themes that have engaged Weems are represented, including personal narrative, such as Family Pictures and Stories and the famous Kitchen Table Series; the legacy and locales of slavery, including Sea Islands Series, Jefferson Suite, Slave Coast, and Dreaming in Cuba; contemporary perceptions of African Americans, as in Colored People and Afro-Chic; and the universal struggle for equality dealt with in works like Ritual and Reunion.