It's the first full day of autumn, a Monday, crisp and brilliant, and what she knows, but can't tell me yet, is that she's already won a 2013 MacArthur fellowship, aka the 'genius grant.' That big, ongoing laugh, I realize when the news goes public two days later, is her belated retort. Today, the laugh has a special resonance I don't pick up on until later. And what a laugh it is, deep and generous and ongoing, enough to fill the ample storage and office space she has in Syracuse, New York, the city where she lives with her husband, Jeff Hoone, the executive director of Light Work, a group that provides financial support to artists. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to playĪnd then she laughs about it. There's a sense that I don't even deserve to know, because there's nothing that I can possibly do with that-you see what I'm saying?' And though this scene could end here, with Weems laughing about it (as she eventually does), wait, give her another minute: 'The deeper point is, I kept bumping into all these people, white people, who'd been coming to Rome for years, leading programs in Rome, doing all these things, and I'm like, 'You never told me you come to Rome.' People I really trusted, people I thought had kind of open minds, are having this whole dynamic experience that they don't think I'm worthy enough to tell. Instead, she let it go.īut slights like that remain.

She could (and maybe should) have said, 'What the fuck are you doing here?' She thought about it. Weems could have said that her work-based in photography, and about African-American life, by all means, but obsessed too with gender, class, and history-had as much right to a place at the academy as this woman's, maybe more. One day, though, a past fellow-Weems won't say who-paid a visit to the academy's villa atop Janiculum Hill and sputtered, 'Carrie Mae Weems, what-what are you The influential but out-of-the-limelight artist Carrie Mae Weems had received a prestigious fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, and not only was she grateful to be in Italy and having the time of her life, she was actually connecting the cultural dots, using the city as a backdrop to produce some of her best work to date.

This happened in Rome not long ago, in 2006-in the twenty-first century, in other words.

Weems kitchen table series