CARRIE MAE WEEMS:
FROM HERE I SAW WHAT HAPPENED AND I CRIED
& SELECTED WORKS

Opening Reception, January 19, 2018
6:30 PM – 8:00 PM
Admission: $7.00 for non-members. $3 for seniors and students. Free for Members.

Carrie Mae Weems Lecture, February 4, 2018
2:00 PM – 3:30 PM
Auburn Avenue Research Library
101 Auburn Avenue, NE, Atlanta, GA 30301
Seating is limited. Registration is required.

Hammonds House Museum launches its 30th Anniversary Season with an exhibition and film by acclaimed visual artist, Carrie Mae Weems. The opening night reception will include a conversation with Anne Collins Smith, Spelman College Museum’s Curator of Collections, facilitated by Hammonds House Museum’s Interim Executive Director and exhibition curator Leatrice Ellzy Wright.

The exhibition, From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, exposes how photography has played a key role throughout history in shaping and supporting racism, stereotyping and social injustice. The installation is comprised of appropriated photographs of enslaved people in the American South and other 19th and 20th century photographs of Africans and African Americans that Weems found in museum and university archives. Among the photographs she selected were daguerreotypes commissioned in 1850 by Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz. Agassiz traveled throughout the American South with a photographer, making portraits of the enslaved. He intended to use these portraits as visual evidence to support his theories of the racial inferiority of Africans, and to prepare a taxonomy of physical types in the slave population. Weems has said, “When we’re looking at these images, we’re looking at the ways in which Anglo America – white America – saw itself in relationship to the black subject.

“I wanted to intervene in that by giving voice to the subject that historically had no voice.” She did just that by re-photographing the images, enlarging them and printing them through colored filters. Two blue images bookend a grouping of images printed in red. She framed the red-toned prints in circular mattes, meant to suggest the lens of a camera, and placed all of the prints beneath glass sandblasted with text. Each photograph with a text written by Weems, evokes the layers of prejudice imposed on the depicted men and women. Weems’ work offers a contemporary reading of this historical group of images.

Also on view is “People of A Darker Hue”, a 14-minute short which invites the viewer to reflect on enforcement practices and policies that impact communities of color. Weems narrates the film with her dignified cadence and at once becomes informer and mourner as she speaks the names of those unarmed men and women killed due to police violence. The film will play continuously during museum hours. “People of A Darker Hue” perfectly complements the exhibition and the times we are living in.