by VICTORIA L. VALENTINE on Aug 13, 2020 • 6:58 am
IN A NEW ONLINE VIEWING ROOM, Jack Shainman Gallery is showcasing Carrie Mae Weems‘s iconic Kitchen Table Series (1990). The photographs feature succession of staged scenes that explore female identity, experiences, and relationships in the context of a traditionally female domain.
Employing visual performance, image making, and a compelling narrative text, the powerful series provides a lens through which to view a woman’s life. Not the artist’s life, but that of the female subject.
Weems casts herself in the images, serving as an archetype in a gendered space that is both sanctuary and battleground—for moments of solitude and internal dialogue as well as gathering, participation, and shared experience around family dynamics, friendship, and the war between the sexes.
There are 20 images and 14 text panels in the series. Weems produced the body of work in 1990 at home, at her kitchen table, with a single light source—a hanging pendant lamp. At the time, she was teaching photography at Hampshire College in Amherst, a small college town in Massachusetts. She worked at odd hours, late at night and early in the morning, whenever she could claim time for her own practice. She was 38.
“I had been really thinking a lot about what it meant to, what it meant to sort of develop your own voice and so I made this body of work, the Kitchen Table Series,” Weems told Art21. “It started in a curious way as a kind of response to my own sort of sense of what needed to happen, what needed to be, and what would not be simply a voice for African American women but what would be a voice more generally for women.”
“I had been really thinking a lot about what it meant to, what it meant to sort of develop your own voice… It started in a curious way as a kind of response to my own sort of sense of what needed to happen, what needed to be, and what would not be simply a voice for African American women but what would be a voice more generally for women.” — Carrie Mae Weems
THE PHOTOGRAPHS SPEAK VOLUMES on their own. Adding the text gives dimension and specificity, a call-and-response with the visual narrative. At one point in the first half of the series, accompanying images of Weems with a male counterpart, the text reads:
In 2016, Weems spoke to T: The New York Times Style Magazine about the series upon the publication of a book dedicated to the body of work. The artist said she had already completed the photographic project when she decided to introduce the text. Hillary Moss reported how the two elements came together:
Examining the performative aspects of Weems’s practice, Franklin Sirmans considered the significance of the text elements of the series in the exhibition catalog “Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video.”
He wrote: “With its concise, poetic writing that recalls the vernacular and oral narration in the language of Zora Neale Hurston, the tragic narrative of blues music, and the cadence of jazz vocals, Weems’s Kitchen Table Series is now a hallmark of the era a defining piece of the late 1980s and early 1990s history of contemporary art.”
AT JACK SHAINMAN, the online exhibition presents a multimedia overview of the Kitchen Table Series. It’s a veritable digest. Photographs and text panels from the series are featured along with quotes from interviews with Weems and articles about the work. The passages frame the series and highlight critical reactions, the artist’s intentions, and her influence on a younger artist (Xaviera Simmons). A video of Weems speaking about the series in 2018 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., is included. Installation views of the series on display at the Art Institute of Chicago and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum are showcased.
The gallery notes that the entire Kitchen Table Series is in the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art (acquired in 2008) and Detroit Institute of Art (acquired in 2017), and individual works are owned by at least eight more museums. The viewing room also offers a selection of photographs from the Kitchen Table Series for sale.
The project is the subject of a dedicated volume “Carrie Mae Weems: Kitchen Table Series,” (the book Moss was writing about for the Times), where the body of work is published in its entirety for the first time, alongside essays by curators Sarah Lewis and Adrienne Edwards.
“How are women going to image themselves? This was Weems’s guiding question during the earliest moments of conceiving the Kitchen Table Series as she reflected on the corpus of photographic images of women up to the 1980s and what wasn’t there. We have images of women in states of arresting beauty—a force of a certain kind; women in states of maternal focus—another form of authority. Yet there are few images that depict the journey towards an inner sanctum,” Lewis writes in the foreword.
“The Kitchen Table Series remains one of the few narrative works in the history of photography to cast a black female protagonist in a journey towards utter empowerment.” CT
“Carrie Mae Weems: Kitchen Table Series” is on view online at Jack Shainman Gallery
WATCH MORE about the Kitchen Table Series, from Carrie Mae Weems in a short video for Art21.
(print)). | © Carrie Mae Weems, Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery
inches (print); 28 7/8 x 28 7/8 x 1 1/2 inches (framed)). | © Carrie Mae Weems, Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery
BOOKSHELF
“Carrie Mae Weems: Kitchen Table Series” is a special volume dedicated to Carrie Mae Weems’s celebrated body of work made in 1990. The book features for the first time all 20 photographs and 14 text panels from Kitchen Table Series, one of the artist’s earliest series, and includes essay contributions by Sarah Lewis and Adrienne Edwards. “Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video” coincided with Weems’s traveling retrospective which concluded at the Guggenheim in 2014. Franklin Sirmans and Deborah Willis are among the contributors to the exhibition catalogue and each offers thoughts about the arc of Weems’s practice, including the Kitchen Table Series.