Dimensions: 12 x 10 Inches
Medium: Archival pigment print on 314gsm Epson Legacy Platine fine art paper
Provenance: Officially licensed by artist and publisher. Publishing information on back of print. Comes with gallery Certificate of Authenticity.
Edition: Limited Timed Edition of unknown edition size
Year: 2019 (created) 2024 (printed)
Condition: Excellent
ABOUT THE ART
Carrie Mae Weems’s installation Repeating the Obvious is comprised of thirty-nine square framed inkjet prints of various sizes arranged along two walls. The prints feature an identical image in black and white that appears cast in an ethereal blue glow. At the center of each stands a young Black man in front of a dark, indistinct background with his hands resting casually in his black pants pockets. He wears a dark ball cap, a hoodie with the hood pulled up over the cap, and an open leather jacket over the hoodie.
The young man stands at a slight angle as if facing someone to the left and behind the photographer. A light shines directly on him, almost too brightly, and the spot of light is so focused that only his head, left arm, and torso are fully lit.
The thirty-nine prints range in size from a few inches to several feet and are divided up unevenly. Rather than aligning the prints in neat rows or columns, they are spread about, some in clumps, some in pairs, others seeming to be alone as they span up to 9 feet high and 20 feet across the two walls. The layout of the thirty-nine square prints is simultaneously precise and organic, the sizes intermixed with no easily discernible pattern. They course up and down the walls much like rolling hills.
The young man in the prints immediately evokes the iconic photo of Trayvon Martin in a hoodie that went viral after Martin’s death. However, these are deliberately made with a slight blur. The blurriness of the face here renders him no man in particular and therefore a ready symbol of all young Black men in the United States today. In a time when viral images on social media can easily be scrolled away from, what does it mean to approach thirty-nine copies of the same image at once that are so recognizable and yet impossible to fully identify?
ARTIST BIO
Steeped in African American history, Carrie Mae Weems makes alternately searing and tender photographs and videos that explore race, family, class, and gender identity. The artist, who has also worked in verse and performance, embraces activism throughout all her work—in particular, she looks to history in order to better understand the present. In the early 1990s, Weems rose to prominence with her beloved “Kitchen Table” series: intimate black-and-white photographs that undermine tropes of African American life and womanhood as they depict the artist seated at her kitchen table alone or alongside various other characters. Over the course of her career, Weems has received countless honors, including the Prix de Roma, the National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, and the MacArthur “Genius Grant.” In 2014, she became the first Black woman to mount a retrospective at the Guggenheim, and her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.