Critical insight into the mind and eye of an artist renowned for her work investigating history, identity, and power.

Transcending medium, chronology, and geography, Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter puts the artist—as well as her spiritual and philosophical journeys—at the center of the discourse. Weems is a touchstone artist, renowned for her work investigating history, identity, and power.

A comprehensive monograph, The Heart of the Matter features generous presentations of landmark bodies of work, from Family Pictures and Stories (1981–82) to her most recent series on the Black church. Throughout the book, the artist’s spiritual musings provide critical insight into the iconic artist’s mind and eye. Newly commissioned essays and additional contributions from esteemed thinkers and scholars across generations underscore the singular value of Weems’s vision in grappling with the complexities and injustices of the world around us. Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter will accompany a related exhibition at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin, opening in April 2025.

The monograph shares her distinctive approach to addressing history, representation, and injustice through the lens of race, gender, and class, while often centering Weems as a historical reference point, guide, or muse. The book also debuts her work exploring religion and spirituality for Black Americans across generations, commissioned specifically for the catalog and an accompanying exhibition in Turin, Italy. The new series, Preach (2024), celebrates the profound, passionate, and joyful forms of worship that typify Weems’s own experience of the Black Church, while also confronting the violence and oppression inextricably linked to this history.

In Sarah Meister’s introduction and throughout the book, the artist’s likeness, voice, family history, and spiritual journey offer a distinctive framework through which to approach her practice. Newly commissioned essays from esteemed scholars, including Drs. Erich Kessel, Megan Kincaid, and Tiana Reid; as well as her lifelong friend, the artist Dawoud Bey; and her husband, Jeffrey Hoone, complement shorter texts by a range of distinguished thinkers.

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Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 264
Number of images: 170
Publication date: 2025-07-01
Measurements: 8.5 x 10 x 1 inches
ISBN: 9781597115841
The book is copublished by Aperture and Allemandi Editore.

Contributors

Carrie Mae Weems (born in Portland, Oregon, 1953) is a widely influential artist whose work gives a voice to people whose stories have been silenced or ignored. Over the course of forty years, she has built an acclaimed body of work using photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and video. She has received numerous awards, including a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the US Department of State’s Medal of Arts, the Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Her work is in collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Tate Modern, London. 

Sarah Hermanson Meister is executive director at Aperture. She worked in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art for more than twenty-five years, where she curated acclaimed exhibitions on the work of Josef Albers, Bill Brandt, and Brazilian modernist photographers, as well as Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, and many more.

Jeffrey Hoone was director of Light Work, Syracuse, New York, for forty years and is a working artist. He has written extensively on photography and served on peer review panels for the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is married to Carrie Mae Weems.

Dawoud Bey makes groundbreaking and evocative work about the histories of Black communities. A major career retrospective of his work, An American Project, was co-organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Bey’s many books include the Aperture titles Class Pictures (2007), Dawoud Bey on Photographing People and Communities (2019), and Elegy (2023).

Dr. Erich Kessel is assistant professor of art history at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. A scholar of contemporary art and critical Black studies, Kessel has published essays on Jacob Lawrence and Jacolby Satterwhite. He is coeditor of a collection of sketches entitled An Excess of Quiet: Selected Sketches by Gustavo Ojeda, 1979-1989 (2020), which was a finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LBGTQ Nonfiction. Kessel received his PhD in the history of art and African American studies from Yale University in 2023.

Dr. Tiana Reid is assistant professor of English at York University, Toronto. Her research and teaching interests include Black literature, gender, and labor. Her writing has appeared in American Quarterly, Art in America, Bookforum, Frieze, the Nation, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, and the Paris Review, among other places. She is a former editor at the New Inquiry and Pinko. In 2021, she received her PhD in English and comparative literature from Columbia University. 

Dr. Megan Kincaid serves on the faculties of the Cooper Union and New York University. Her scholarship reconstructs the history of Modernism in the Americas through the lens of critical refugee theory and mobility studies. Her writing has been published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Duke University Press and has appeared in Artforum, the Brooklyn Rail, Gagosian Quarterly, among others. She has organized exhibitions of José Antonio Fernández-Muro, Cauleen Smith, Frank Stella, and others. She received her PhD from New York University in 2024.