The Shape of Things
September 14 — November 9, 2024
New York: 21st Street
Carrie Mae Weems’ Cyclorama: The Shape of Things (2021) is a culminating work in an ongoing, four-decade-long career dedicated to probing the jagged history of racial injustice in the United States and the world at large. On view almost continuously in different museum venues since its acclaimed premiere at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, The Shape of Things will return to the city in a special, free-to-the public, presentation at Gladstone, which coincides with the 2024 presidential election and to mark the artist’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery. At this moment of grave political precarity, with democracy itself on the ballot, Weems’ video installation immerses the viewer in a moving visual and sonic evocation of resistance, resilience, and redemption. Projected within a cylindrical structure, The Shape of Things draws its panoramic imagery from the 19th-century cyclorama, a popular form of entertainment comprising a 360° history painting often depicting epic battles and military conquests, frequently, and not unironically here, those from the Civil War. These circular murals and the structures that housed them would travel from city to city across the country, like the circus—another potent source for Weems in her quest to convey the convoluted spirit of our times, when tragedy and absurdity conspire together but cannot, despite all apparent efforts, drown out hope.
Installation
Work
Video
About
Carrie Mae Weems
Photo: © Rolex, Audoin Desforges
Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1953, Portland, Oregon) lives and works in Syracuse, New York. Recent exhibitions include The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d'Italia, Painting the Town at the Rijksmuseum, Remember to Dream at CCS Bard Hessel, Carrie Mae Weems: The Shape of Things at LUMA Arles, Reflections for Now at Barbican Art Gallery in London, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, organized by Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart and thereafter traveled to Kunstmuseum Basel, as well as Carrie Mae Weems: Remember to Dream at Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College. In the spring of 2023, Weems served as the inaugural Agnes Gund Professor of the Practice of Arts and Social Justice at Brown University, a residency that culminated in the campus-wide activation collectively titled Varying Shades of Brown.
Weems has received numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including a National Medal of Arts, Hasselblad Award, the Bernd and Hilla Becher Prize, the MacArthur “Genius” grant, the US State Department’s Medal of Arts, the Joseph Hazen Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, NEA grants, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award, among others. Her work is in the collections of 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 The Tate Modern, London, among others.
