Carrie Mae Weems & Claudia Rankine

MacArthur Foundation fellows Claudia Rankine and Carrie Mae Weems are featured together as part of our free Poets Aloud series, in partnership with the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics of the University of Pittsburgh. Rankine won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her New York Times bestselling book of poetry, Citizen: An American Lyric. Visual artist Weems is represented in museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and The Tate Modern, London. Join us for a presentation from both Claudia Rankine and Carrie Mae Weems, followed by discussion between the two artists.

Through photography and video, Carrie Mae Weems has created a complex body of art that investigates family relationships, gender roles, racism, classism, and politics. Although Weems addresses a wide array of issues, in all the work her overarching commitment is to help us better understand our present moment by examining our collective past.

Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; two plays including Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue; numerous video collaborations, and is the editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry.