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#1. Affirms: "Creative people have passion for their activities, often beginning early in life" (Starko, 2018, p. 105) // Contests: "The notion of the 'artistic personality' is more myth than fact" (Abuhamdeh and Csikszentmihalyi, 2004, qtd. in Starko, p. 103) 

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#1. Affirms: "Creative people have passion for their activities, often beginning early in life" (Starko, 2018, p. 105) // Contests: "The notion of the 'artistic personality' is more myth than fact" (Abuhamdeh and Csikszentmihalyi, 2004, qtd. in Starko, p. 103) 

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"The desire to create images has never not felt powerful, something Weems understood from the first time she held her own camera. She was 20, and it was a birthday present from her boyfriend, Raymond, a Marxist and labor organizer. 'I think that the first time I picked up that camera, I thought, "Oh, O.K. This is my tool. This is it,"' she tells me."

"After her parents’ divorce, Weems moved with her mother and siblings into a large house owned by her grandfather. She would pirouette down the long wood-floored hallway and look out the attic windows, wearing her mother’s work smock, imagining she was a dancer or an actress.

“'I was simply becoming interested in this idea of being an artist in the world in some sort of way, not knowing really what the arts were,' she says."

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#2. Affirms: Creative, teaching environments foster creativity

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#2. Affirms: Creative, teaching environments foster creativity

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"Weems . . . left home at 17, following her best friend, the film director Catherine Jelski, to San Francisco, where the choreographer Anna Halprin invited her to join her modern dance company. Later, Weems earned degrees from California Institute of the Arts and University of California, San Diego, where she lived with the artist Lorna Simpson, another longtime friend, and she also studied folklore at U.C. Berkeley.

"Looking through the Black Photographers Annual, she saw her future in artists — mostly men — who looked like her, who were doing the kind of work she wanted to be doing, and in 1976, she tried New York again. 'I came to New York to be with them, to see them, to talk to them, to interview them, to study with them, to become their friends, to see their exhibitions,' she remembers. While studying photography at the Studio Museum in Harle.... a friend and mentor in the photographer Dawoud Bey, who taught her at the Studio Museum, and who recalls her 'humility and passion' as a student."

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#3. Affirms: Creative persons are rebels, trailblazers

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#3. Affirms: Creative persons are rebels, trailblazers

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"Weems’s work [in "The Kitchen Table Series" (1989-90)] represented the first time an African-American woman could be seen reflecting her own experience and interiority in her art." (Fig. 1)

"In a 1997 series, 'Not Manet’s Type,' she plays a muse, her negligee-clad reflection in front of a bed, beheld and objectified — or simply invisible. 'It was clear I was not Manet’s type,' the accompanying text reads. 'Picasso — who had a way with women — only used me & Duchamp never even considered me.'" (Fig. 2)

"A 2006 Rome Prize from the American Academy made possible a line of work called 'Roaming,' challenging the idea that an African-American artist couldn’t have international resonance: Looking at Weems’s ghostly alter ego dressed in black outside historic sites in the Italian capital, one wonders who could possibly better understand the architectures of power." (Fig. 3)

"In 'The Museum Series' (2005-6), the spectral figure appears again outside the Louvre, the Pergamon and the Tate Modern, the kinds of institutions that, feeling their authority increasingly in question, now call upon Weems to tell them how they might remain relevant. The figure — a testament to exclusion, longing for admission — challenges the idea of art made by white men as being the only art in Western culture capable of speaking to our common humanity." (Fig. 4)

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All quotations from:
O'Grady, M. (2018, October 15). How Carrie Mae Weems Rewrote the Rules of Image-Making. T: The New York Times' Style Magazine.