Carrie Mae Weems

I attended Carrie Mae Weems’ lecture at MCA this week. I think it is funny how many more people go to certain lectures just because the person is supposedly more famous. Anyways, it was nice to see a good turn out. I hadn’t seen much of Weems’ work previously except the Snow White piece we saw in Art History, and then what was shown on the Art 21 video. She is a passionate speaker, she has one of those voices that draws you in and makes it seem like she truly means everything she says. Her work is similar, though I wish she had shown more. Weems spent a lot of time on her project against violence in her hometown. I didn’t find it that exciting because I feel that many cities and/or neighborhood groups have done extremely similar things, this time it is just an artist doing it. And the signs didn’t look any different than similar ones I’ve seen in terms of aesthetics, and the message was similar, too. Getting involved in the community is great, but I didn’t think it should be in the same category as her other works which show much more ingenuity. I wish she had talked more about her ideologies and how she represents them in her art. They are fairly obvious but I would have liked to hear her speak about them, and how she came to these conclusions and how she does research. Maybe because she is pretty well known and has done a lot of lectures she assumes we already knew all about it. Hopefully that wasn’t the case since that would be rather self-important. Anyways, it was a decent lecture, but not the best. And I couldn’t believe only one question was asked! My question would have needed a whole other lecture.