Contested Sites of Memory: A Performance with Artist Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems, a celebrated American artist whose work gives voice to people whose stories have been silenced or ignored through her groundbreaking four-decade art practice, is partnering with E Pluribus Unum, an organization focused on building a more just, equitable, and inclusive South, for a special convening of racial healing across Richmond organizations, including the School of the Arts and the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University and the Virginia Museum of History and Culture. Weems, who is known for her work around racial justice, will direct a performance entitled Contested Sites of Memory: A Performance with Artist Carrie Mae Weems, featuring live music, spoken word, and new and existing video works. For this performance Weems is collaborating with local choir Destiny One and nationally celebrated musicians Nona Hendryx, Jawwaad Taylor, and Craig Harris. Additional performers include poets/writers Carl Hancock Rux and Esther Armah. This event is produced in collaboration with Shore Art Advisory and in community with Emerson Collective.

Join us for a one-night-only performance of Contested Sites of Memory: A Performance with Artist Carrie Mae Weems Wednesday, October 2. The performance will start at 6 PM. Seating is limited, registration is required.

This is a hybrid event. The performance will be streamed live via YouTube.

About the artist:

Carrie Mae Weems is a celebrated American artist whose work gives voice to people whose stories have been silenced or ignored through her groundbreaking four-decade art practice. Grounded in the specificity of her lived experience as a Black woman but universal in its explorations of family relationships, cultural identity, power structures, and social hierarchy, her artistic practice is primarily photographic but also incorporates text, fabric, audio, installation, and video. Informed by narrative storytelling, folkloric traditions, and the observational methodologies of the social sciences, her approach to image-making ranges from staged and serialized narrative to appropriation and adaptation of archival and ethnographic imagery. Weems takes aim at the complicity of the photographic medium in propagating dehumanizing tropes and the historical omission of Black women from fine art institutions and canons.