Carrie Mae Weems and THE OFFICE Present RESIST COVID/TAKE 6!

MacArthur Fellowship-winning artist Carrie Mae Weems and producer THE OFFICE performing arts + film aim to scale up Weems' Resist COVID/Take 6! public service campaign across New York City and throughout the U.S. Conceived by Weems as Syracuse University Artist-in-Residence, with Pierre Loving, the initiative seeks to raise awareness about the deadly virus-and the measures necessary to prevent its spread-within Black, Latinx, and Native American communities, which are disproportionately impacted.

To date, Weems and THE OFFICE have partnered with arts centers, museums, food banks, universities, and health clinics, among other mission-driven organizations, to roll out the campaign in multiple NYC locations and other cities including Syracuse, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Durham, Nashville, Dallas/Fort Worth, Atlanta, Sarasota, and Savannah. Now they are working to bring the campaign-whose title refers to the recommended six feet of separation in social distancing-and its urgent messaging to all 50 states. Upcoming activations include Lincoln Center, which unveils bilingual versions of Resist COVID/Take 6! in multiple locations across its campus today (October 15).

Through various creative means (billboards, wheatpaste, lawn signs, bus shelters, church fans, bags, buttons, bookmarks, magnets, reusable and paper bags) Resist COVID/Take 6! highlights the staggering death toll of COVID-19 and alerts the general public. Through these efforts, it underscores the importance of social distancing, encourages public discussion, dispels the myths and dangers of false cures associated with the virus, and thanks our front line and essential workers.

"Our project is meant to be a public service awareness campaign that in some small way helps to save lives, as a constant reminder of what needs to be done as we push through this pandemic and its extraordinary effect on us," says Weems. "We needed lawn signs; we needed posters to go into business windows; we used newspaper advertising circulars to deliver messaging directly into the home; we used grocery bags, shopping bags, paper and reusable bags that we could give to food banks and pantries-because we know that with the unemployment crisis this really hit in some of the poorest communities across the nation, where food lines are miles long. And inside the bags would be all kinds of material that could be used and serve as a constant reminder that this is serious, this is not a hoax, this is deadly real."

The urgency of raising awareness in the communities that need it most, in every state across the country, is both immediate and will be ongoing, as the country continues to grapple with the virus in the months and possibly years to come. As one of the leading photographers of our day and the first Black woman to have a career retrospective show at the Guggenheim, Carrie Mae Weems' stirring images make this both a public art installation and a vital public health initiative.

"What I've found heartening and surprising in equal measure is the way in which any number of cultural institutions have taken this project and are using this project to connect to their public and communities in ways they've never quite connected before," says Weems. "And that it is one of those projects that allows people to have an ongoing dialogue and a commitment of care about the community in which it's situated. These institutions are saying, we care about being in this community, we care about keeping you safe, and we care about keeping you whole."

Widely renowned as one of the most influential living American artists, Carrie Mae Weems examines how our society structures power through deeply embedded stories, images, and ideas. A gifted storyteller who works porously between text and image, Weems has developed a revolutionary approach to the expression of narratives about women, people of color and working-class communities, "conjuring lush art from the arid polemics of identity" (The New York Times). With a complex body of work encompassing photography, text, fabric, audio, digital image, installation, performance, and video, Weems' work asks us to look deeply at the two-dimensional image, to explore complex realities and revisit unexamined perspectives.

Weems has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at major national and international museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frist Center for Visual Art, the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Spain. Weems has received numerous awards and honors, including the MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, the Rome Prize, the U.S. Department of State Inaugural Medal of Arts, BET Honors Visual Artist Award, and W.E.B. Du Bois Medal from Harvard University.

She is represented in public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; MoMA, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; MOCA, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Tate Modern, London. Weems resides in Syracuse and Brooklyn, New York. She is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery.

THE OFFICE produces a variety of Weems' projects, which include her multi-artist, multi-disciplinary performance works Grace Notes: Reflections for Now (premiered Spoleto Festival USA, 2016) and Slow Fade to Black with Geri Allen (premiered BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival 2012); Resist COVID/Take 6!, her COVID-19 public awareness project; The Future Is Now and I Am It: A Parade to Mark the Moment at the opening festival of the REACH at the Kennedy Center; and unique, expansive gatherings like Carrie Mae Weems LIVE: Past Tense / Future Perfect, a two-day series of presentations, performances, and conversations with artists, activists, curators and others held in association with her 2014 career retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.