Carrie Mae Weems: A Land of Broken Dreams

Logan Center Exhibitions at the University of Chicago is pleased to present Carrie Mae Weems: A Land of Broken Dreams in partnership with the Smart Museum of Art as part of the multi-site exhibition Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40.

On view July 17–December 12, 2021, Carrie Mae Weems: A Land of Broken Dreams features an array of media and objects—photography, video, texts, bric-a-brac, and furniture—through which Weems reimagines the Black Panther Party’s programs for young people in Chicago during the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the main gallery, visitors are invited to browse, sit, and explore a classroom setting replete with desks, chairs, books, a blackboard, View-Masters, and posters of historic Black leaders. A smaller gallery, designed to resemble a theater, will screen video works by Weems as a meditation on Black identity and its fraught history in America, offering a space in which to process sustained histories of conflict in our contemporary lives.

Running online in parallel to the onsite exhibition, a dedicated website featuring video content, an interview, a video tour, and other digital materials supports viewer engagement from afar. Visitors are invited to attend the opening reception on Saturday, July 17, 12-4pm with a timed-ticket through the University of Chicago Box Office. The opening will coincide with other partner organization openings on campus and a full schedule will be available on the Toward Common Cause website.

Additionally, a robust programming calendar, which will be announced late summer 2021, is being planned in collaboration with the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture and Logan Center Community Arts at the University of Chicago, and will feature a film screening and conversations around Black radical pedagogy.

Carrie Mae Weems: A Land of Broken Dreams is presented by Logan Center Exhibitions in collaboration with the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago and is curated by Abigail Winograd, MacArthur Fellows Program Fortieth Anniversary Exhibition Curator; with Alyssa Brubaker, Exhibitions Manager; and Leigh Fagin, Senior Director of Programming and Engagement. This exhibition is made possible by support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Reva and David Logan Foundation, and friends of the Logan Center.

For more information and details about related programming, visit loganexhibitions.uchicago.edu or follow Logan Center Exhibitions on Facebook and Instagram.

About Carrie Mae Weems
Through image and text, film and performance, and her many convenings with individuals across a multitude of disciplines, Carrie Mae Weems has created a complex body of work that centers on her overarching commitment to helping us better understand our present moment by examining our collective past.

Weems has received numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including a MacArthur Award; a US Department of State Medal of Arts; a Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome; a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, among many others. Major solo exhibitions of Weems’s work include Carrie Mae Weems: The Museum Series, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2014), and Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video, Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville (2013–14; traveled to: Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University; Guggenheim Museum, New York).

Her work is in public and private collections around the world, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Weems is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. She lives in Syracuse, New York, with her husband, Jeffrey Hoone, who is executive director of Light Work.

About Toward Common Cause
Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40 explores the extent to which certain resources—air, land, water, and even culture—can be held in common. Raising questions about inclusion, exclusion, ownership, and rights of access, the exhibition considers art’s vital role in society alongside its calls for vigilance in defending shared resources. Presented on the 40th anniversary of the MacArthur Fellows Program, Toward Common Cause deploys the Fellows Program as “intellectual commons” and features new and recontextualized work by 29 visual artists who have been named Fellows since the award program’s founding in 1981.

Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40 is organized by the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago in collaboration with exhibition, programmatic, and research partners across Chicago. It is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Additional support for individual projects has been provided by Allstate; the Terra Foundation for American Art; the National Endowment for the Arts; The Joyce Foundation; David Zwirner; Hauser & Wirth; a Mellon Collaborative Fellowship in Arts Practice and Scholarship at the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry; the Visiting Fellows Program at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society; and the Smart Museum’s SmartPartners. In-kind support is provided by F.J. Kerrigan Plumbing Co and JCDecaux.

About Logan Center Exhibitions
Logan Center Exhibitions presents international contemporary art programming at the Logan Center Gallery and throughout the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. Reflecting the spirit of inquiry at the university, Logan Center Exhibitions focuses on open, collaborative, and process-based approaches to cultural production. Working closely with artists, students, scholars, and community members, Logan Center Exhibitions presents innovative exhibitions by emerging and established artists; supports ambitious new commissions and research projects; disseminates knowledge through publications; and facilitates connections through talks and other public programs.