in conversation with Carrie Mae Weems & Mary Marshall Clark: Public, Private, Political?

Presented in conjunction with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company’s New York City premiere of parts one and two of the Analogy Trilogy at The Joyce Theater, Bill T. Jones and renowned multi-media artist Carrie Mae Weems discuss making art about the personal in a public sphere as a political being. Moderated by the Director of the Columbia Center for Oral History Research Mary Marshall Clark.

Bill T. Jones in Conversation is sponsored by Metropolitan Capital.

 

About the panelists

Considered one of the most influential contemporary American artists, Carrie Mae Weems has investigated family relationships, cultural identity, sexism, class, political systems and the consequences of power. Determined as ever to enter the picture— both literally and metaphorically—Weems has sustained an on-going dialogue within contemporary discourse for over thirty years. During this time Carrie Mae Weems has developed a complex body of art employing photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and video.

In a recent review of her retrospective in the New York Times, Holland Cotter wrote, “Ms. Weems is what she has always been, a superb image maker and a moral force, focused and irrepressible.”

Weems has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at major national and international museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Frist Center for Visual Art, Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Spain.

Weems has received numerous awards, grants and fellowships including the prestigious Prix de Roma, The National Endowment of the Arts, the Alpert, the Anonymous was a Woman and the Tiffany Awards. In 2012, Weems was presented with one of the first US Department of State’s Medals of Arts in recognition for her commitment to the State Department’s Art in Embassies program.

In 2013 Weems received the MacArthur “Genius” grant as well as the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Since she has also received the BET Honors Visual Artist award, the Lucie Award for Fine Art photography, the ICP Spotlights Award from the International Center of Photography, the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal from Harvard University, the Distinguished Feminist Award from the College Arts Association, and the National Artist Award from Anderson Ranch.

Ever invested in social causes, Weems also serves on the board of several institutions including People for the American Way, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Art21, the Everson Museum of Art, and the Gifford Foundation.

She is represented in public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, NY and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Weems has been represented by Jack Shainman Gallery since 2008.

 

In addition to being the Director of the Columbia Center for Oral History Research located in INCITE, Mary Marshall Clark is co-founder and director of Columbia’s Oral History Master of Arts (OHMA) degree program, created in 2008-09. Formerly, she was an oral historian and filmmaker at the New York Times. Mary Marshall has been involved in the oral history movement since 1991, and was president of the United States Oral History Association from 2001-2002, and has served on the Executive Council of the International Oral History Association.

She was the co-principal investigator, with Peter Bearman, of the September 11, 2001 Oral History Narrative and Memory Project, a longitudinal oral history project through which over 1,000 hours of interviews were taken with eye-witnesses and immigrants and others who suffered in the aftermath of the events. She also directed related projects on the aftermath of September 11th in New York City.

She has directed projects on the Carnegie Corporation, the Atlantic Philanthropies, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Japanese Internment on the East Coast, the Apollo Theater and Women in the Visual Arts. She has interviewed lead figures in the media, human rights, women’s movements and the arts.

Mary Marshall writes on issues of memory, the mass media, trauma, and ethics in oral history. Her current work focuses on the global impact of torture and detention policies at Guantánamo Bay. Mary Marshall is an editor of After the Fall: New Yorkers Remember September 11, 2001 and the Years that Followed, published by The New Press in September, 2011. She is a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. Clark holds two masters degrees from Union Theological Seminary.