Carrie Mae Weems: From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried
Another good thing about Weems’s rolling pin is that it doesn’t hit you over the head. In her work she orchestrates clashes between picture and text that point to racial imbalances in America without ever spelling out exactly what she has to say. Over the years her photographs of black people have served as guilt-magnifying backgrounds to racist jokes and riddles and as half-ironic illustrations of narratives about herself and her family. In her “Colored People” series (1989-’90), she tinted photographs of black people with the colors they used to describe their skin: “golden yella,” “violet,” “blue black,” and “burnt orange.”
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The title of the exhibit, “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried,” derives from the texts of two companion works, both rectangular and blue, hanging on opposite walls of the gallery, at two ends of an imaginary line dividing the room so that the African pictures are on one side and the American pictures on the other. These images of a black woman’s profile exactly mirror each other, and if you stand at the point equidistant between the pictures and face the same direction as the woman, it seems you are “here,” seeing through her eyes: that is, looking on at the early history of black people in America, with the memories of abductions in Africa right behind you. In the geometric terms Weems presents, the African past is square and 19th-century America is circular, and the exhibit is about the violence with which square pegs were forced into round holes. In terms of color, Africa is black and white, like a dream or distant memory, and America is red, the color of blood and anger.
