Carrie

Mae

Weems's

'Something

Grander

Still'

on

view

at

the

University

of

Texas

“There’s something grand in the knowing and the creating of ourselves, and something grander still about how we know and create our personal histories,” Carrie Mae Weems observed in a 1984 artist statement for ‘Family Pictures and Stories’ (1978–84). Weems has returned periodically to this multigenerational, multimedia family album of photographs, text, and audio over the next forty years, and continues exploring its concerns with the relationships among the self, identity, and history.

Featured in AGBS’ Christian-Green Gallery, ‘Carrie Mae Weems: Something Grander Still’ tracks the creation of ‘Family Pictures and Stories’, focusing on Weems’s ongoing re-use of her family pictures and stories from the early 1980s to today. A study room in AGBS’ Idea Lab unfolds Weems’s participation in dialogues about the politics of photography in the 1980s and early 1990s. The study room collects art and publications made by artists and activists who embraced photography and video as means to bring visibility to marginalized experiences and resist forms of othering prevalent in mainstream media.

Following the journeys of Weems and her family pictures through art schools and museums as well as worlds of Black photography, the global social documentary movement, and feminist thought, Something Grander Still sheds new light on the development of one of the most significant artistic practices of the twenty-first century.