/guid/9202a8c04000641f80000000056e59f9 rename

Carrie Mae Weems (born 1953) is an award winning photographer and artist. Her photographs, films,...

Carrie Mae Weems (born 1953) is an award winning photographer and artist. Her photographs, films, and videos have been displayed in over 50 exhibitions in the United States and abroad and focus on serious issues that face African Americans today, such as racism, gender relations, politics, and personal identity. She has said, "Let me say that my primary concern in art, as in politics, is with the status and place of Afro-Americans in our country." Weems was born in Portland, Oregon in 1953 the second of seven children to Myrlie and Carrie Weems. After high school, she moved to San Francisco to study modern dance. She decided to continue her arts schooling and attended the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. She graduated at the age of twenty-eight with her BA. She received her MFA from the University of California, San Diego. Weems also participated in the graduate program in folklore at the University of California, Berkley. While in her early twenties, Carrie Mae Weems was politically active in the labor movement as a union organizer. Her first camera was used for politics rather than for artistic purposes. She was inspired to pursue photography only after she came across