Carrie Mae Weems: Lincoln, Lonnie, and Me

Carrie Mae Weems "Lincoln, Lonnie, and Me - A Story in 5 Parts", 2012

5 October 2022 to 15 January 2023

“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”.
Carrie Mae Weems

The Capella MACBA hosts Lincoln, Lonnie, and Me, a video installation that, staging life-size phantasmagorical figures, examines the formulation of historic narratives and how past tragedies are constantly renegotiated through Weems’ relationship with president Abraham Lincoln and activist Lonnie Graham. A proposal presented in parallel to the exhibition project organized by Fundación Mapfre in collaboration with Foto Colectania, Barcelona, and Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, where over four decades of Weems’ photographic work will be on show.

With the presentation of this major installation, MACBA joins these leading institutions to revisit Weems’ seminal trajectory. An initiative that highlights how, through a practice that has persistently proved ahead of her time, she has succeeded in reflecting on a complex past while projecting her work into the future, conveying a tireless sense of hope.

This proposal, which unfolds in three different venues in Barcelona, evolves from a chronological to a conceptual approach and features some of Weems’ seminal photographic series, as well as her methodological pursuit of insisting on certain images and tropes, revealing a practice that develops inquisitive narratives around gender, race, class, history and representation. Weems’ praxis aims to transcend her immediate context to establish a dialogue with a multiplicity of communities, a call and response that connects different generations on the basis of reciprocal influence, responsibility and care.

Hosted by space KBr of Fundación MAPFRE in Barcelona Foto Colectania and MACBA, the three exhibitions take place from October 2022 to January 2023.

Lincoln, Lonnie, and Me is being presented at MACBA as part of the project “A Great Turn in the Possible”, organised by Fundación MAPFRE in collaboration with Fundación Foto Colectania and Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart.