Join us Saturday, October
4, at 2 pm, for a live performance and screening of Leave Now! (2022),
a video made by renowned artist Carrie Mae Weems, Skidmore’s 2025 McCormack
Visiting Artist-Scholar Resident.
The film offers an
unflinching glance at the migration story of her grandfather, Frank Weems, a
tenant farmer and prominent union organizer in Arkansas, who attempted to sue
the state of Arkansas for his mistreatment and separation from his family. In
light of his failed attempt, Weems raises the significance of reparations as a
moral imperative and source of remediation and justice. Weems will be joined by
pianist Vijay Iyer and violinist Jennifer Koh.
Presented by Skidmore
College’s Office of Special Programs, Art Department, and the Tang. This event
is free and open to the public.
About the Artists
Carrie Mae Weems, a conceptual artist, unpacks
and confronts constructions of race and femininity in the pursuit of new models
to live by. Grounded in the specificity of her lived experience as a Black
woman but universal in its explorations of family relationships, cultural
identity, power structures and social hierarchy, her artistic practice is
primarily photographic but also incorporates text, fabric, audio, installation,
and video. Informed by narrative storytelling, folkloric traditions and the
observational methodologies of the social sciences, her approach to
image-making ranges from staged and serialized narrative to appropriation and
adaptation of archival and ethnographic imagery. Weems takes aim at the
complicity of the photographic medium in propagating dehumanizing tropes and
the historical omission of Black women from fine art institutions and canons.
Weems lives in Syracuse, New York with her husband Jeffrey Hoone. She is
currently the Artist in Residence at Syracuse University.
Vijay Iyer has carved out a
unique path as an influential, prolific, shape-shifting presence in
twenty-first-century music. A composer and pianist active and revered across
multiple musical communities, Iyer has created a consistently innovative,
emotionally resonant body of work over the last three decades, earning him a
place as one of the leading music-makers of his generation. His honors include
a MacArthur Fellowship, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a United States
Artist Fellowship, three Grammy nominations, and the Alpert Award in the Arts.
His newest albums are Defiant Life (ECM, 2025), his second
suite of duets with visionary composer-trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith; Compassion (ECM,
2024), featuring his celebrated trio with drummer Tyshawn Sorey and bassist
Linda May Han Oh; Trouble (BMOP/sound, 2024), a composer
portrait album comprising three of his orchestral works, including the titular
violin concerto performed by Jennifer Koh; and Love in Exile (Verve,
2023), his Grammy-nominated collaboration with Arooj Aftab and Shahzad
Ismaily. The New York Times observed, “Iyer’s music has always
been both intelligent and unpretentious, complex without being opaque; [he]
ponders a phrase with obsessive rumination, unveiling layers of shifting,
subtle emotion, before letting it fly with joyous abandon.” He is a professor
at Harvard University.
Grammy Award-winning
violinist Jennifer
Koh is
recognized for her intense, commanding performances, delivered with dazzling
virtuosity and technical assurance. She is a forward-thinking artist dedicated
to exploring a broad and eclectic repertoire. She has expanded the contemporary
violin repertoire through a wide range of commissioning projects and has
premiered more than 100 works written especially for her. Named Musical
America’s 2016 Instrumentalist of the Year, Koh has won the International
Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, Concert Artists Guild Competition, and an
Avery Fisher Career Grant. She has a BA in English literature from Oberlin
College and studied at the Curtis Institute, where she worked with Jaime Laredo
and Felix Galimir. She is an active lecturer, teacher, and recording artist for
Cedille Records. Koh is Artistic Director of the Kennedy Center’s Fortas
Chamber Music Concerts and Artistic Director of arco collaborative,
an artist-driven nonprofit.