DESCRIPTION

This publication is dedicated solely to the early and canonical body of work by American artist Carrie Mae Weems (born 1953). The 20 photographs and 14 text panels that make up Kitchen Table Series tell a story of one woman’s life, as conducted in the intimate setting of her kitchen. The kitchen, one of the primary spaces of domesticity and the traditional domain of women, frames her story, revealing to us her relationships—with lovers, children, friends—and her own sense of self, in her varying projections of strength, vulnerability, aloofness, tenderness and solitude.
As Weems describes it, this work of art depicts “the battle around the family ... monogamy ... and between the sexes.” Weems herself is the protagonist of the series, though the woman she depicts is an archetype. Kitchen Table Series seeks to reposition and reimagine the possibility of women and the possibility of people of color, and has to do with, in the artist’s words, “unrequited love.”

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Carrie Mae Weems, one of today's most influential contemporary American artists, has work in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and London's Tate Modern. Her previous publications include The Hampton Project (Aperture, 2001), Kitchen Table Series (2016), and Strategies of Engagement (2018). Weems has been awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award, and a US Department of State Medal of Arts.

REVIEWS

“In book form, Kitchen Table is more intimate…. Unlike the experience of meandering through a museum, stepping back to appreciate the images and nearing the text panels to skim them, the pace of exploration is now in a person’s hands. […] Weems remarks, of “Kitchen Table” in particular, “It has clearly touched the lives of a great many people. It touches a chord and speaks to something that’s fairly universal.” And, something that’s continuously fresh. “The thing that is fascinating is that the work seems to exist in its own time,” she says. “It is difficult for one to sense when it was made. The photographs could have been made 20 years ago or yesterday.” For all of this, she’s proud. She adds, laughing: “I’ve learned a great deal about myself through this work and it still surprises me.”” –Hilary Moss, New York Times

Moss, Hillary, “Revisiting Carrie Mae Weems’s Indelible Series — Almost Three Decades Later” New York Times, April 5, 2016