Carrie Mae Weems Joins Gladstone, Departing Her Longtime New York Gallery in the Process

The celebrated photographer Carrie Mae Weems has joined Gladstone Gallery, which has locations in New York, Brussels, and Seoul. Through her new representation, Weems will depart New York’s Jack Shainman Gallery, which has shown her art for the past 15 years.

Gladstone’s first exhibition with Weems will take place in the fall of next year at one of its New York spaces. She now joins a roster that includes Sarah Lucas, Wangechi Mutu, Alex Katz, Shirin Neshat, Arthur Jafa, and many more.

A representative for Gladstone said that the gallery’s representation of Weems would be exclusive in New York. She will continue to be represented by Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco and Galerie Barbara Thumm in Berlin.

“The opportunity to work with Carrie Mae Weems at this point in her trajectory is a great honor,” Barbara Gladstone, founder of Gladstone Gallery, said in a statement. “Her conceptually driven, aesthetically powerful work is unflinching in its call for social justice and equity. She has been profoundly influential as both an artist and a teacher on a generation of artists, and we look forward to bringing her art to a wide public.”

Weems’s most famous works are the photographs in her “Kitchen Table Series” of the 1990s, in which the artist herself appears in a dimly lit kitchen alongside Black men, women, and children. These works question how identity is constructed, and do so by highlighting how Weems’s actions in these pictures are performances that appear to be done specifically for her camera.

Since then, Weems’s art has taken a variety of forms, from photographic installations to a film made using the pepper’s ghost technique, in which images are projected such that they appear to be three-dimensional. Her focuses have included anti-Black caricatures, intersections of Blackness and femininity, and the harmful legacy of past racist violence.

In New York, her work can currently be seen at the Guggenheim Museum in the exhibition “Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility.”

Gladstone partner Gavin Brown called Weems “an artistic, cultural, and social force whose incredible body of work has catalyzed essential public discourse and continues to inspire artists to join her in tackling the most tenacious issues of our times.”