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"  This happened in Rome not long ago, in 2006\u2014in the twenty-first century, in other words. The influential but out-of-the-limelight artist Carrie Mae Weems had received a prestigious fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, and not only was she grateful to be in Italy and having the time of her life, she was actually connecting the cultural dots, using the city as a backdrop to produce some of her best work to date. One day, though, a past fellow\u2014Weems won&amp;#039;t say who\u2014paid a visit to the academy&amp;#039;s villa atop Janiculum Hill and sputtered, &amp;quot;Carrie Mae Weems, what\u2014what are you doing here?&amp;quot; Weems could have said that her work\u2014based in photography, and about African-American life, by all means, but obsessed too with gender, class, and history\u2014had as much right to a place at the academy as this woman&amp;#039;s, maybe more. She could (and maybe should) have said, &amp;quot;What the fuck are you doing here?&amp;quot; She thought about it. Instead, she let it go. But slights like that remain. And though this scene could end here, with Weems laughing about it (as she eventually does), wait, give her another minute: &amp;quot;The deeper point is, I kept bumping into all these people, white people, who&amp;#039;d been coming to Rome for years, leading programs in Rome, doing all these things, and I&amp;#039;m like, &amp;#039;You never told me you come to Rome.&amp;#039; People I really trusted, people I thought had kind of open minds, are having this whole dynamic experience that they don&amp;#039;t think I&amp;#039;m worthy enough to tell. There&amp;#039;s a sense that I don&amp;#039;t even deserve to know, because there&amp;#039;s nothing that I can possibly do with that\u2014you see what I&amp;#039;m saying?&amp;quot; And then she laughs about it. And what a laugh it is, deep and generous and ongoing, enough to fill the ample storage and office space she has in Syracuse, New York, the city where she lives with her husband, Jeff Hoone, the executive director of Light Work, a group that provides financial support to artists. Today, the laugh has a special resonance I don&amp;#039;t pick up on until later. It&amp;#039;s the first full day of autumn, a Monday, crisp and brilliant, and what she knows, but can&amp;#039;t tell me yet, is that she&amp;#039;s already won a 2013 MacArthur fellowship, aka the &amp;quot;genius grant.&amp;quot; That big, ongoing laugh, I realize when the news goes public two days later, is her belated retort. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York is a good retort too. That&amp;#039;s where 128 pieces of Weems&amp;#039; extensive body of work will be, starting January 24, in her first-ever\u2014speaking of belated\u2014midcareer survey. It&amp;#039;s an oeuvre that began in the late 1970s, with black-and-white photographs of her family and moved toward the conceptual, employing staged images, performance, the use of written and spoken word, and video.  Weems&amp;#039; work is political but not polemical; powerful without yelling; content driven while maintaining a visual poetry. In the series &amp;quot;From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried,&amp;quot; she puts the voiceless into the historical record, tinting daguerreotypes of nineteenth-century black people (some of them slaves) bright red, then etching the images with words. (Across one older woman in a head scarf: &amp;quot;You Became Mammie, Mama, Mother &amp;amp;amp; Then, Yes, Confidant\u2014Ha.&amp;quot;) In &amp;quot;Roaming&amp;quot; (taken, indeed, in Rome) the artist traverses the city as a specter in a long black dress, her back turned to us as she bears witness to the monuments of history\u2014and in effect rewrites the book, inserting herself into the center of a scene with which women who look like her (or women, period) are rarely associated. &amp;quot;One of the most interesting things about her work is an overriding commitment to challenging the status quo,&amp;quot; says Kathryn E. Delmez, the curator at Nashville&amp;#039;s Frist Center for the Visual Arts\u2014where Weems&amp;#039; retrospective originated before traveling to museums in Portland, Oregon; Cleveland; California (at Stanford University); and finally New York. Weems&amp;#039; best-known work is the 1990 &amp;quot;Kitchen Table Series.&amp;quot; The black-and-white staged photographs tell the story of Weems (or a character portrayed by her) as she negotiates domestic life\u2014having her hair brushed by a friend, tiredly watching her children, eyeing a lover over a drink\u2014all while seated at the most basic of tables and under the harshest of lights. What looks simple at first is rich in content. Even the lamp\u2014interrogative, accusatory, more apt for the 77th Precinct than a kitchen\u2014is loaded. The series ends with the protagonist playing solitaire, as unforgettable as Bergman&amp;#039;s Knight in The Seventh Seal, only instead of Max von Sydow playing chess with Death, it&amp;#039;s Carrie Mae before a deck of cards. Weems says her aim with &amp;quot;Kitchen Table&amp;quot; was &amp;quot;to place a woman boldly front and center in the work and have her look back at the audience. There was a time in the &amp;#039;50s, &amp;#039;60s, and &amp;#039;70s when women didn&amp;#039;t really know how to present themselves before the camera.&amp;quot; Rarely, if ever, in art history have black women been depicted as protagonists, dealing with angst and triumph, despair and joy, sometimes nothingness. &amp;quot;When we put the exhibition on the calendar,&amp;quot; says Jennifer Blessing, the Guggenheim&amp;#039;s senior curator for photography, &amp;quot;anytime I spoke with younger artists or her peers, everyone was so excited. It felt that it was time, it should happen. It&amp;#039;s time for her to have her retrospective.&amp;quot; The show caps a roughly yearlong period in which Weems, now 60, has been showered with accolades: the U.S. State Department&amp;#039;s Medal of Arts Award, presented by Hillary Clinton; an honor from the national Delta Sigma Theta sorority; the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award; and the Gordon Parks Foundation Award (alongside fellow honorees Peter Beard, Swizz Beatz, and Donna Karan). When that call came in September, Weems thought that the MacArthur Foundation wanted her to recommend another artist for the grant. Told she was a winner, she put her head down on her desk and bawled for five minutes. More than the money\u2014$625,000\u2014it basically meant, &amp;quot;Hey, sister, your work has not been in vain,&amp;quot; she tells me later. &amp;quot;Then I wiped my tears and went back to work and cooked dinner for my husband.&amp;quot;  Carrie Mae Weems is tall and fit\u2014with her, 60 really is the new 40\u2014and her voice, an alto in the mid to low registers, is clear and mellifluous, with excursions to the South. Combine her presence with her cultural breadth\u2014she transitions fluidly from Italian cinema to John Coltrane\u2014and she could easily sit in for Charlie Rose during his next vacation to France. She&amp;#039;s self-deprecating with regard to her appearance\u2014&amp;quot;I always think, You should try to do something with yourself&amp;quot;\u2014but on this upstate New York afternoon, in jeans, a slim black trench, thick-framed black glasses, and black nail polish, she&amp;#039;s Brooklyn chic, and in fact, she keeps a studio around the corner from the Pratt Institute. She sits close, leans forward, and likes to touch you when she makes an important point, which is often, and offers high fives when we agree. She loves the word fabulous and usually says it twice, deeper the second time, with fervor. Fabulous. Fabulous! Weems grew up in Portland, Oregon, one of seven children in a middle-class family that provided &amp;quot;the moral grounding that gives you the ability to walk into any room and feel comfortable.&amp;quot; Her mother ran a barbecue restaurant\u2014still the best Weems has tasted outside of St. Louis, she says\u2014and her father was a laborer and singer who performed on the church circuit. At 16, she got pregnant with Faith, her first and only child, an experience she calls &amp;quot;difficult, painful, upsetting. I didn&amp;#039;t know if my life was over or not, but I had great support from my family.&amp;quot; Her mother, sister, and aunt helped her raise her daughter. Weems took dance classes from a young age. &amp;quot;I was a natural,&amp;quot; she says. After graduating from high school, she visited her best friend in San Francisco, who was taking classes with the postmodern-dance pioneer Anna Halprin. Weems just tagged along, but as soon as Halprin laid eyes on her, she invited her to join the esteemed San Francisco Dancers&amp;#039; Workshop. &amp;quot;It was truly amazing,&amp;quot; Weems says. &amp;quot;It was very avant-garde work. We were taking our clothes off constantly.&amp;quot; After a year and a half, &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#039;t quite understand the value of dance,&amp;quot; Weems says. &amp;quot;But dancing was an entr\u00E9e into many other parts of my life.&amp;quot; Lacking any real plan, she came to New York, turned 18, and lived with a cast of free spirits in Harlem, then ping-ponged between coasts. When a boyfriend gave her a camera for her twentieth birthday, &amp;quot;the magic of photography kind of hit.&amp;quot; She enrolled in classes at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where the photographers Dawoud Bey and Roy DeCarava\u2014pioneers, younger and elder, of documenting African-American life\u2014would become teacher and inspiration, respectively, as well as dear friends. &amp;quot;From there I knew that I was pretty serious about this,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;that it would be my life&amp;#039;s work.&amp;quot; Her first solo show, &amp;quot;Family Pictures and Stories,&amp;quot; was a reaction against the controversial 1965 Moynihan Report, which argued that the black American family was inherently flawed, largely because of a matriarchal structure that hindered men from acting as authority figures. Refuting the claim, the black-and-white photos of Weems&amp;#039; own large clan\u2014working, parenting, arguing, rejoicing\u2014portray African-American life in its totality. The series debuted in 1984 as part of her MFA thesis at University of California, San Diego (she had earned a BFA from the heralded CalArts in 1981). She insisted it be shown in downtown San Diego: &amp;quot;I knew black people weren&amp;#039;t coming to snooty La Jolla. I wanted the work to be seen by a diverse audience.&amp;quot; Weems says she still often finds herself the only black person at art or social events, which she describes as shocking. And she&amp;#039;s still grappling with audience. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m always thinking about access to a broader community that doesn&amp;#039;t participate in the museum. How do I have a conversation with them?&amp;quot; Not that she hasn&amp;#039;t made inroads. &amp;quot;The only time that 35 black people have ever called me in the course of a day is when I had work in Jet. &amp;#039;Girl, you&amp;#039;re in Jet.&amp;#039; Not Artforum, not The New York Times. I was in Jet, and that meant something to my folks.&amp;quot; She leans closer, touches my knee. &amp;quot;I saw Angela Bassett recently, who I adore, and she said, &amp;#039;Carrie Mae Weems, can I take my picture with you?&amp;#039; And I&amp;#039;m thinking, &amp;#039;No, I want to take my picture with you! You&amp;#039;re my queen.&amp;#039; I was stunned she knew about me.&amp;quot;  Race and gender are raised ad infinitum in discussions of her work, which in itself is, of course, ghettoizing. (&amp;quot;They want to see the black Carrie,&amp;quot; is how Weems puts it.) While some consider her an activist, she begs to differ. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m very much an idealist, but I work by myself. I&amp;#039;m in no groups. I don&amp;#039;t demonstrate. The marches I&amp;#039;ve done, I&amp;#039;ve done on my own.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I see Carrie as an American artist,&amp;quot; says the photographer and multimedia artist LaToya Ruby Frazier, 31, who studied with Weems and recently had her first solo show at the Brooklyn Museum. &amp;quot;Her work isn&amp;#039;t meant to be just for black audiences; this is a concern for all mankind, which is why there is such a poignant and poetic presence in all her images.&amp;quot; Weems absorbed much of Rome&amp;#039;s la dolce vita ethos. (On the subject of her sixtieth-birthday celebration at the Alhambra Ballroom in Harlem last April: &amp;quot;It was a kickin&amp;#039; party. Everybody was up in there. People were cryin&amp;#039; and singin&amp;#039; and swingin&amp;#039;. We had great food, great music. It was, like, fabulous. Fabulous! Ha!&amp;quot;) She&amp;#039;s optimistic, too, about the gains some African-Americans have made\u2014in the arts, especially\u2014but for most, she likes to use poet Amiri Baraka&amp;#039;s phrase: It is &amp;quot;the changing same.&amp;quot; Much of the black population in her city of Syracuse lives below the poverty line, she says, &amp;quot;and not only that, they live below the poverty line of Mississippi.&amp;quot; In 2012, she established the Institute of Sound + Style, a summer program in Syracuse that pays high school students a small stipend to learn skills for arts and fashion careers. Also in 2012, she debuted &amp;quot;The Obama Project,&amp;quot; a video in which the president&amp;#039;s face morphs into that of Abraham Lincoln, a Batman-style Joker, a leopard, Hitler, Mao, Jesus, and others; over Samuel Barber&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Adagio for Strings,&amp;quot; Weems&amp;#039; voice intones, &amp;quot;He was like me. He was like you. He was like us. He was other, he was different. He was a kid, a punk, a neophyte, a nigger, a na\u00EFf, a nobody. And then, a somebody.&amp;quot; Today, she says she&amp;#039;s not disappointed with Obama but with the country. &amp;quot;There was something about the American imagination that wanted to express its openness, but he&amp;#039;s been treated so badly, by the public and especially by the right, but also by Democrats. So every move he made was questioned from all angles.&amp;quot; She&amp;#039;s up for a glass of wine now, and then it&amp;#039;s back to work and her latest project, a commission from UMass Amherst to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of brilliant sociologist and civil-rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois. She wanted to create something different\u2014for herself and for Du Bois\u2014&amp;quot;that would be really interesting and memorable and meaningful for hundreds of people.&amp;quot; So with landscape artist Walter Hood, Weems designed a garden in his honor and named a flower, the Du Bois Peony of Hope, which she hopes will be on sale for the next 100 years. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m so excited,&amp;quot; she says, laughing that big laugh again. &amp;quot;You can have hope spring eternal in your garden. It&amp;#039;s fabulous. It&amp;#039;s really fabulous!&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/art-design/a12622/carrie-mae-weems-profile/>