5/19/2023 0 Comments Carrie mae weems![]() ![]() Conceptual artist Carrie Mae Weems has taken these fragments to construct a narrative that reckons with this somber history and draws a straight line to contemporary racialized norms in her photographic series From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–96), currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. To be Black in America often means that your history has been deliberately withheld, and the fragments that remain have been reframed to veil the unconscionable terrors that built the foundation of this nation. Forget where you come from, forget your languages, forget your rituals, religions, homeland. ![]() When I ask my grandmother about her time on the cotton plantations of Louisiana, she rolls her eyes: “Here she go remembering again.” Carrie Mae Weems, You Became Mammie, Mama, Mother & Then, Yes, Confidant–Ha, 1995–96Ī “land condemned to forgetfulness” is what the writer Eduardo Galeano once called America. When I go to the nation’s edge and put my feet into the shore of the Atlantic, I think of women throwing their babies overboard to be set free by the water, and the crashing waves turn to screams. I sliced a watermelon open across its belly last summer and gasped, as the red flesh and black seeds resembled bodies inside the barracoon. ![]()
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