Carrie Mae Weems: Social Studies

The book Carrie Mae Weems: Social Studies represents a comprehensive look at the artist’s career over the past thirty years. As Carrie Mae Weems describes, “During the past twenty-five years, I have worked toward developing a complex body of art that has at various times employed photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and, most recently, video. My work has led me to investigate family relationships, gender roles, the histories of racism, sexism, class, and various political systems. Despite the variety of my explorations, throughout it all it has been my contention that my responsibility as an artist is to work, to sing for my supper, to make art, beautiful and powerful, that adds and reveals; to beautify the mess of a messy world, to heal the sick and feed the helpless; to shout bravely from the roof-tops and storm barricaded doors and voice the specifics of our historic moment.”

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Second Skin: Josephine Baker & the Modern Surface

Description
What does a black burlesque star have to do with some of the most enduring and passionate ideas in modern aesthetic theory? The spectacular Josephine Baker emerges in this fascinating untold story as a principal figure in the drama behind the making of Euro-American Modernism. Instead of seeing her nude performances as a Primitivist given, Cheng argues that Baker’s famous skin was central to the debates about and desire for “pure surface” that crystallized at the convergence of modern art, architecture, machinery, and philosophy. Taking the reader across the Atlantic – through real stages and imagined houses; banana plantations and ocean liners; metallic bodies and radiant cities – this study tracks the ardent and protean conversation between the making of a Modernist style and the staging of a new black visuality. In this account, Baker and the Modernists known to have adored and objectified her in fact shared a common dream: the fantasy of remaking and wearing the skin of the other.

Anne Anlin Cheng is a Professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University. Her fields of study include race studies, aesthetic theory, film, performance and psychoanalytic theories.  She is the author of The Melancholy of Race: Assimilation, Psychoanalysis, and Hidden Grief, and she works with a special focus on Asian American and African American literatures of the twentieth century.