Carrie Mae Weems was the first African American artist to have a solo show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The veteran film-maker and photographer is so famous over there that she appears as herself in Spike Lee’s Netflix adaptation of She’s Gotta Have It, and yet she is still scarcely known in Britain. The Barbican retrospective Carrie Mae Weems: Reflections for Now – huge, historic, enthralling, ranging over 40 years of work – will surely change that.
It opens with a shock: a group of large abstract paintings, very beautiful, reminiscent of the New York school of male painters of the 1950s. Except that your eyes, and these works, deceive you. They are in fact photographs of American walls in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis in 2020. Protesters in Portland, Oregon, painted slogans on boarded-up buildings; the authorities painted over them with swathes of black, brown and grey. And so the cycle of cover-ups continues.
