Carrie Mae Weems: Something Grander Still
Carrie Mae Weems, Van and Vera with kids in the kitchen, from Family Pictures and Stories, 1978-84. Gelatin silver print, size variable. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery © Carrie Mae Weems
Carrie Mae Weems: Something Grander Still
January 30 – may 9, 2026
“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.
About the Artist
Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1953, Portland, Oregon) is a widely influential American artist whose work gives voice to people whose stories have been silenced or ignored. Investigating history, identity, and power, Weems finds connections between personal experience and the larger structures and institutions that shape our lives. Over the course of forty years, she has built an acclaimed body of work using photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and video.
Weems has been featured in major exhibitions at museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Cantor Center for the Arts at Stanford University; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville. She has received numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including a Hasselblad Award, a Bernd and Hilla Becher Prize, a MacArthur “Genius” grant, the US State Department’s Medal of Arts, the Joseph Hazen Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, NEA grants, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award, among others. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Tate Modern, London; among others.
Attending Programs
January 29, 2026 5 - 8 PM: Opening Reception
March 5 - 6, 2026: Something Grander Still Convening
This exhibition and its programming are made possible through support from the Lehman Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Research for this exhibition was assisted by an ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.
