Museum Essay #2

BLACK WOMAN WITH CHICKEN

You Became A Scientific Profile 

My initial impression of the exhibition was astonishment; as I realized Carrie Mae Weems has done a ton of work! There are so many series that Weems has done and they are all beautifully captioned. I also noticed that Weems is extremely poetic, the way she captions these appropriated photos is impactful, I found myself reading drawn to many of the photos, you can’t simply glance at her work. I understand that some of her works are appropriated; there is a personal spin that Weems must add in order to allow for this appropriation to be possible, one personal stamp I noticed was the monochromatic tint added to a series of photos titled From here I saw what happened and I cried. I felt this series of photos examined African Americans as the object in the photos, especially since Weems clearly captioned it as so. Weems approached the idea of “justifying racism” in this series.  This series also seemed to be challenging existing stereotypes of gender and race. We as a class got a preview of this series during class, learning that these photos were appropriated from Peabody Museum Harvard University. When looking at these photos, you can understand the subject matter immediately, where Weems uses these photos to question the original intentions of white photographers - and how these photos represent ownership in some way. Another personal stamp is Weems wording, it is flawless and almost seems like it should have been part of the original photo since it seems to capture the intentions of the photographers quite well, and that's what she says basically, these painting seem possessive of the "black folk" that why not just state it as such.

This woman has two floors dedicated to her work. And although the Guggenheim is a small museum, the walls are flooded with her work. Ain’t Jokin’ series is the first set of pictures I responded too. I thought they were extremely funny, that's probably a bad reaction, but the way she addressed these African American stereotypes was humorous and blunt. This series probably interested me the most because even though almost all of  her works addressed the topic of racism, this series spoke to the modern part of the world. In that I mean to the generation of teenagers or even adults that still use these stereotypes because they believe it is somewhat true. I honestly notice stereotypes like the picture above still thrown around these days. I saw the idea of “race” also challenged in the series titled Color People, where Weems investigated the beauty found in the range of skin colors, these photos are extremely beautiful, Weems also trademarked the idea of “colorism” in this series because of the subject matter; the idea of social values assigned to skin color. Also by adding monochromatic square panels to these photos.

Our visit to the Guggenheim had a more personal feel rather than to the MET and that is due to the size of the Guggenheim Museum. Although I enjoyed our visit to the Metropolitan, there was so much work to ever truly appreciate every single piece. Even though we were privileged enough to have of all these works available, there is no way of seeing all of them in one visit. In the Guggenheim we were able to visit every gallery and enjoy them because of the limited amount of work. However both museums thrive in their own way and are nonetheless enjoyable.