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Carrie Mae Weems Performance of Past Tense
Saturday, March 23, 2019, 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
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Critically acclaimed artist Carrie Mae Weems, deemed “one of the more interesting artists working in the gap between art and politics” by The New York Times, presented Past Tense on March 23, a new performance-based work featuring singers Eisa Davis, Francesca Harper, and Imani Uzuri; poet Carl Hancock Rux; dancer Vinson Fraley; and musicians Craig Harris, Eddie Allen, Calvin Jones, Adam Klipple, James Brandon Lewis, and Tony Lewis. Through music, text, projection, and video, the performance explores the enduring significance of the iconic character Antigone and her profound relevance to our contemporary moment.
The origins of Past Tense lie in Weems’s powerful work Grace Notes. Weems says, “While working on Grace Notes for months it occurred to me that I was telling the story of Antigone, wherein an innocent man dies by unjustified means, and his sister fights for the right to bury him honorably. But the wider community refuses her; her right to justice, and to peace, is denied.”
Past Tense is produced by THE OFFICE performing arts + film: Noah Bashevkin, Laurie Cearley, Olli Chanoff, Rachel Chanoff, Gabrielle Davenport, Catherine DeGennaro, Diane Eber, Chloe Golding, Lynn Koek.
Carrie Mae Weems also presented a Lecture at Grace Farms on Friday, March 15.
To learn more about Carrie Mae Weems’ work visit the CT Post profile on the artist.
About Carrie Mae Weems
Carrie Mae Weems was born in Portland, Oregon (1953) and currently lives and works in upstate New York. Through image and text, film, video, photography design, installation, and performance, along with her many convenings with individuals across a multitude of disciplines, she has created a complex body of work that centers on her overarching commitment to helping us better understand our present moment by examining our collective past. Weems has received a multitude of awards, grants, and fellowships including a MacArthur “Genius” grant; an International Medal of Arts from the US Department of State; the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome; the National Endowment of the Arts; and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, among many others. Major solo exhibitions of Carrie’s work include Carrie Mae Weems: The Museum Series, at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2014) and Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Videoat the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, which also traveled to: Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University; Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2013 – 2014. She is represented in public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate Modern, London, England; the Museum of Modern Art, New York and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
