Artist Carrie Mae Weems H’12 Receives National Medal from White House

Since 1984, the US government has presented the National Medal of Arts to celebrate the "outstanding contributions" of artists "to the excellence, growth, support, and availability of the arts in the United States."

It is the highest federal award given to artists and patrons of the arts. Weems is the first Black female visual artist to receive it.

Weems, who is an artist-in-residence at Syracuse University, told the university that she was profoundly humbled by the great honor. "I thank my colleagues, along with the many other great women artists of color who came before me, widened the path and took the heat, but unfortunately were not recognized for their tremendous achievements," she said.

More than twenty artists were recognized at the White House ceremony Monday evening, a group that included Spike Lee, Queen Latifah, Alex Katz, Steven Spielberg, and Ken Burns. Addressing them, President Biden said, "With absolute courage, you combat racial stereotypes, confront ghosts of history, and speak truth to power."

"The artist's gift is a sixth sense, to imagine something that no one else can carve, paint, write, sing, dance, or film until they set their vision free," he added.

According to Syracuse University, "Weems's four decades of work-including groundbreaking and distinctive compositions of photography, text, audio, installation, video, and performance art-depicts topics of race, gender, social injustice, and economic inequity throughout American history to the present day."

Storytelling is a fundamental aspect of her work; it is the way she expresses the human condition that has been a focus from her earliest documentary photographs, according to Bowdoin's honorand introduction. This approach continued through her increasingly complex and layered works as she endeavored to intertwine themes of yearning, loss, cultural identity, and the consequences of power.

She is the first Black woman to have a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, and her work has been exhibited extensively throughout the world, including the Brooklyn Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Canada, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Weems has received the MacArthur Fellowship, the US Department of State's Medal of Arts, the Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize Fellowship, the National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, among others.

Originally from Portland, Oregon, she earned her bachelor of arts degree at the California Institute of the Arts and a master of fine arts degree at the University of California-San Diego.

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