One of the key bodies of work featured in Carrie Mae Weems’s current exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery, The Museum Series, pictures the artist framed by art institutions around the world. Dressed in black with her back to the camera, Weems faces the grand stone and metal facades of institutions in Europe and the U.S. Using her body to stand in for the viewer, Weems questions the exclusionary histories of the places she visits. The resulting images act as ruminations on the collecting and exhibiting practices of these sites, highlighting the constellation of questions about race and gender inequality, agency, and access that surround them. We take a closer look at the series, which Weems began in 2006, examining its meaning and how it fits with her larger practice.
Throughout the series, Weems varies the scale and position of her figure, sometimes appearing small next to the building she faces, sometimes acting as a strong visual counterpoint. The most recent additions to the ongoing project are two photographs made in the fall of 2024 at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor. In the Court of Honor at the museum’s entrance, Weems positions herself in dialogue with the monumental Auguste Rodin cast bronze sculpture of The Thinker, matching the statue’s scale with her own. She also pictures herself passing through the museum’s marble portico, framed by columns and shadows.
Weems has often used herself as a model in her work. “There was something about the sense of my own body and my own physicality, the way that I look, the way that I comport myself, the way that I stand, and the way that I gesture—that…was really of interest to me,” she told ARTnews in 2022. “I come out of a dance background, so being aware of my physical presence in a space was also of deep interest to me.”
The series was the focus of a 2014 exhibition at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Carrie Mae Weems: The Museum Series, which ran concurrently with her solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The museums Weems pictures have a role in shaping cultural memory. As the Studio Museum notes, the series questions “the manner by which cultural institutions affirm or reject certain histories through their collecting and display decisions.”
For Weems, questions about what’s inside these institutions connect to their physical presence.
“I think it’s critical to consider how we occupy space,” says Weems, “what spaces we are invited into, what spaces we are barred from entering—the dynamics of space and the politics of space, who belongs in what spaces,” she notes in an interview from the 2021 October Files book devoted to her work.
Even when her figure appears small, Weems’s presence within the photographs is imposing, writes Deborah Willis in “Carrie Mae Weems—Making Points and Changing Views,” an essay in the book Women and Migration(s) II. Notes Willis, “She stands like a monumental sculpture to be reckoned and dealt with in the confines of those structures on which she stares down.”
