Carrie Mae Weems is a featured artist in this fifty-five-minute Artis21 documentary that explores conscience and reconciliation with the past and present while exposing injustice and expressing tolerance for others. Her art in this film expresses a modern interpretation of the role of black subjects in photography through the appropriation of old historical images.
https://www.pbs.org/video/art21-compassion/ (Time 22:10 – 37:00)
Her process of sourcing photographs for her work obliged her to resist established institutions that have long practiced a form of “ownership” and gatekeeping and questioned the legitimacy of such conventions. This artistic process reminds me of our Dada Composite project and the concept of artist collectors introduced in Teju Cole’s article “A Visual Remix,” where artist collectors are defined as individuals that appropriate, curate, and juxtapose images from the internet to create new meaning in their body of work. It was her reflection of history in her body of work that led her to realize that the unfortunate events of the past have paved the way for the celebrated milestones of today.
