PHOTOGRAPHY : The Evolution of a Tough Cookie : Racism, sexism and classism permeate Carrie Mae Weems’ photographic palette

OAKLAND —  “I come from a family of Mississippi sharecroppers just a few generations away from slavery, and I experienced a lot of racism growing up--you can’t avoid that if you’re a person of color in this country,” artist Carrie Mae Weems recalls of her childhood in Portland, Ore.

“And if you’ve experienced discrimination, you’re always critiquing the failure of the system, because it has consistently failed for you.

“Things aren’t any better for my generation than they were for my parents either--in fact, they’re probably worse,” she adds. “I see very little evidence that human consciousness is evolving--people are still getting lynched!”

This grim reality is the engine that drives Weems’ work. An inquiry into what she refers to as the “ ism brothers”--racism, sexism and classism--the artist’s photo-based work is the subject of a comprehensive traveling survey organized by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington.

The show, scheduled to open at the Afro-American Museum in Exposition Park on Dec. 8, is currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through Aug. 4. In the meantime, her most recent body of work, “The Sea Island Series,” can be seen at the Linda Cathcart Gallery in Santa Monica through July 31.

Part of a long tradition of political work that’s always run on a parallel track alongside the art mainstream (a tradition that received a sound thrashing when it was given center stage at this year’s Whitney Biennial), Weems’ art stands apart from straight agitprop in its use of high-art motifs. The emotional thrust of her work may be no different from that of Danny Lyons’ incendiary images of the ‘60s civil rights movement, but her delivery system is considerably cooler.

Weems, a graduate of avant-garde petri dish CalArts, infuses volatile political themes with formal rigor and Conceptualist tropes--appropriation, irony, text used as counterpoint rather than caption, staged pseudo-documentary narratives--and often presents her photographs as part of larger installations that incorporate everything from banners and commemorative plates to old records and empty perfume bottles. Eschewing overtly manipulative images of oppression, she focuses instead on the more subtle and insidious forms it takes; Weems finds it in racist humor, for instance, and in the stereotypical role-playing that routinely occurs between men and women. For Weems, the personal is always a metaphor for the social, and it’s the small moments between people that interest her.

“It’s impossible to change the social without changing the personal--you have to put your money where your mouth is. And if you’re not making those challenges at home, it’s unlikely you’ll make them in a larger setting,” the 39-year-old artist observes during an interview at her studio.

“This isn’t to say it’s always bad to be submissive--you got to pay the piper if you want to sing in the band--but you do have to achieve some kind of balance, and we need to be a bit more honest with ourselves about the ways in which we’re complicit in our own oppression.”

Weems’ sophisticated take on the subtleties of personal and social freedom has resulted in a body of work that’s garnered a flurry of rave reviews, the content of which is a bit surprising in light of the intensity of her art. Described as “funny, emotional and telling,” by Art in America critic Nancy Princenthal, and as “an ambitious and deeply satisfying attempt to explore the texture of black experience,” by critic Charles Hagen of the New York Times, Weems’ work is all those things, but it can also be extremely tough.

She has often depicted racial jokes and even stereotypical slurs in her work: One from 1987 titled “Mirror, Mirror,” for instance, shows an image of a black woman gazing into a magic mirror where she sees a white fairy godmother. The text beneath the image reads: “Looking into the mirror, the black woman asked ‘mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the finest of them all?’ The mirror says ‘Snow White you black bitch, and don’t you forget it!!!’ ”

Another image from the same series pairs a portrait of a black man with text that reads: “What are three things you can’t give a black person? A black eye, a fat lip and a job.”

A woman of strong opinions that she expresses with considerable verve, Weems is a curious mix of contradictions. She describes herself as “a tough cookie who comes from a family of tough cookies” and carries herself with a cocky street savvy, but at the same time, she’s extremely elegant and feminine. Exquisitely dressed for an afternoon interview in shimmering green sweater and trousers, she’s a tall, graceful woman who can be coy and coquettish when the mood strikes her, and quite elusive as well--getting Weems to sit down for an interview requires considerable persistence and patience.

Her studio in a performing arts complex in a nondescript industrial district of Oakland is a study in paradox as well. A bustling place where the phone rings constantly and assistants and deliverymen come and go, Weems’ studio is filled with colorful odds and ends--fabrics, curios, artworks--and has a cheerful, upbeat ambience decidedly at odds with the deadly serious nature of her art.

Weems is the second eldest in a family of seven children that migrated to Oregon in the ‘50s. She remembers “feeling a strong sense of community when I was growing up--my family was religious and I was pretty involved with the church when I was young.

“My father was very interested in music,” she continues, “and when he and his brothers were young they had a singing group that used to open for Sam Cooke. There was always music in our house, but there wasn’t much art around. Nonetheless, from the time I was very young I was interested in drawing and painting, and I spent a lot of time with that as a child.”

After graduating from high school, Weems moved to San Francisco and got a job working as a seamstress in a Levi Strauss factory. Shortly after arriving in the city, she also joined a Marxist organization, an affiliation that was to be the most important thing in her life throughout her 20s.

“I got my first camera when I was 21--my boyfriend gave it to me for my birthday--but at that point politics was my life and I viewed the camera as a tool for expressing my political beliefs rather than as an art medium,” she recalls.

“But then after 10 years of intense work, the Marxist-Leninist organization I was with began to fall apart. We’d done union organizing, participated in every major demonstration in the city, put out theoretical journals and published a newspaper, and we were tired. It became clear we all needed to take a break and do something else, and since I’d always been interested in anthropology and culture, I decided to go back to school. I moved to New York with that intention but didn’t get into school right away and didn’t really know what I was doing in New York. But somehow I knew I needed to be there then.”

Though it would be several years before Weems recognized photography as the appropriate creative path for herself, she was awakened to the power of the medium when she was in her mid-20s and saw a series of books called “The Black Photographer’s Annual.” The series, edited by Joe Crawford, showcased work by such seminal black photographers as Roy DeCarava, Bewford Smith and Shawn Walker. “An entire world was laid bare for me in those books,” Weems says. “I never dreamed work like that existed, and it was shocking and wonderful to see.”

Weems’ photographic education picked up steam while she was living in New York in the late ‘70s. “I started looking at a lot of photography when I was living there and began getting jobs assisting photographers,” she says. “Then I enrolled in some classes at the Studio Museum, which had been part of the Kamoinge Workshop, a seminal group of black photographers who worked on the East Coast in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and at that point photography really opened up for me.”

“Zora Neale Hurston’s book ‘Their Eyes Are Watching God’ was important to me during that period, as were Roy DeCarava and Robert Frank--Frank had a way of engaging and interacting that really moved me. In his wonderful book ‘The Americans,’ it’s easy to see that despite the fact that Frank was white, he had a big problem dealing with Anglo America, and that he felt a deep sympathy every time he turned his camera to a black subject.”

Feeling the need for a change of scene and further education, Weems returned to California in 1979 and enrolled at CalArts in Valencia, where she had classes with Jo Ann Callis, John Divola and John Baldessari. “They were doing a lot of documentary and street photography at CalArts then, and that was right up my alley,” says Weems.

Recalls artist Mike Kelley, a friend of Weems’ who also attended CalArts: “When I first met Carrie she was doing straight documentary photography of rural black places, and she’s developed her work in a really interesting way from that beginning. She now often photographs interiors that depict her interacting with various other people, and is essentially positioning herself in a heavily coded version of her own world. Her images are obviously constructed and don’t present themselves as being factual--rather, they have a mythic dimension that forces you to deal with them in a more complex way.”

Weems began exhibiting her work while she was at CalArts (she was included in several group shows in 1980), and after receiving her bachelor’s degree in 1981, she enrolled at UC San Diego, where she studied with Fred Lonidier and David Antin.

“I didn’t really start writing until I got to UCSD, and it was Fred and David who helped me get text into my work,” says Weems, whose use of text is evocative of work by Hans Haacke and Lorna Simpson; like those artists, Weems juxtaposes low-key images and flat, declarative text in such a way that a kind of ideological combustion occurs between the two.

Graduating in 1984 with a masters in fine art, Weems had her first one-person exhibition the same year at the Multi-Cultural Gallery in San Diego, where she showed a body of work titled “Family Pictures and Stories.” Intended as a tribute of sorts to Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes’ 1955 photo essay “The Sweet Flypaper of Life,” the series was Weems’ attempt to understand her own family and was her first fully realized body of work incorporating text. Investigating her family mythology led to an interest in folklore and storytelling, and shortly after completing “Family Pictures” she enrolled in the master’s program in folklore at UC Berkeley.

“Folklore has undergone a profound shift in this century because of the advent of mass media,” Weems says. “When I was growing up I used to listen to my father tell jokes and spooky stories, and it was a way of pulling the family together and passing on moral codes and values. In America today television has replaced oral traditions that have existed for centuries, and we don’t really know yet what the end result of this change will be.”

While at Berkeley, Weems began exploring the ways that humor functions as a socially sanctioned means of addressing issues otherwise considered taboo, and in 1987 she completed “Ain’t Jokin,’ ” a series on racist humor. Playing words off images in various ways, the series examines violent racist jokes, racial stereotyping and negative views of blacks that have been internalized by the black community itself.

“Jokes are a double-edged sword in that they offer a way to talk about things that are often swept under the rug, but at the same time they perpetuate malicious attitudes,” she says. “Of course, exactly how a joke functions depends entirely on context. If a white person tells a Jewish joke in a Gentile situation, the joke is being used to denigrate. If a Jew tells the same joke among Jews, it’s being used to bond and to clarify how Jews are viewed by the dominant culture.”

In 1985 Weems began working on her “American Icons” series, which looks at accepted forms of racism that have infiltrated American life--black “mammy” cookie jars, black jockey lawn ornaments and so forth. Composed and beautifully lit like classic still lifes, these luminous images of innocuous domestic objects read as exploded cliches.

With her next body of work, “Untitled (Kitchen Table Series),” completed in 1990, Weems shifted her attention from race relations to the emotional changes in a middle-class woman experiencing the rise and fall of a love affair.

“Men and women are always struggling to stand face to face--this is an ongoing battle that’s raged for centuries, and it’s something I find endlessly interesting,” she says. “I just finished a new piece that’s a free-standing folding screen decorated with images based on the story of Adam and Eve--it’s a very funny piece actually. It also incorporates images from the Koran and from my own life and essentially asks the question: What does it mean to be different from somebody else? And when all is said and done and the dust finally settles, where are you standing?”

In 1990 Weems also completed “Colored People,” a series of portraits exploring distinctions of color among African-Americans, and the mixed-media installation “And 22 Million Very Tired and Very Angry People,” its title referring to the vast numbers of blacks who migrated from South to North in 1940 when America’s war industry needed workers. The latter piece combined still lifes of single objects (a rolling pin, an alarm clock, a typewriter) with banners inscribed with quotes from writers and theorists Weems admires, including Malcolm X, Anton Chekhov and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

In 1991 Weems completed her most ambitious body of work to date, “The Sea Islands Series,” which aspires to be a new kind of historical chronicle. A portrait of the Gullah people of the Georgia-Carolina Sea Islands--whose customs, beliefs and language patterns are directly linked to those of African slaves who arrived in this country more than a century ago--”The Sea Islands” depicts a time-warped realm where Colonial America and Africa engage in a strange and haunting dance.

Weems had been interested in the Sea Islands since her course work in the 1980s with Lydia Parrish, a Berkeley folklorist known for her studies on the subject, and her interest was further piqued by Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe’s visual portrait of the Sea Islands, “Daufuskie Island: A Photographic Essay” (1982).

“I was there on and off for about six months, and it was fabulous and difficult being there,” Weems says of the fieldwork she conducted in 1990.

“It’s not preserved as a historical site, yet you know you’re in a unique place. There are all-black towns where people speak Gullah, an African-based language with elements of English in it, and people conduct their lives in a very simple manner--you see women weaving baskets for instance. The landscape is marked in very peculiar ways having to do with religious beliefs, and if you don’t know what you’re looking for you’re liable to pass right by these markers. You see mattresses in trees, for instance, and they signify a very particular spiritual and social function.

“I don’t feel finished with ‘The Sea Islands’ as a deep project--the aspect of it that I’m finished with is its identity as a historical place, and the Africanisms that exist there. But what’s going on there now is a whole other project. These people are being pushed out of their homes by various economic forces, so now the Sea Islands is the story of a collapsing community.”

“In ‘The Sea Islands Series’ there’s a passage in the text that says, ‘I went looking for Africa,’ and that phrase led me into the work I’m making now, which is based on a trip I recently took to Africa--this new series includes the phrase ‘I have landed in Africa.’ Both series are an attempt to understand the place of institutionalized slavery within specific cultures. That issue, of course, is at the heart of all my work.”