Join us Thursday, September 25, at 6 pm, for a Whole Grain: Experiments in Film & Video screening of two works selected by Carrie Mae Weems, renowned American artist, National Medal of Arts recipient, and Skidmore’s 2025 McCormack Visiting Artist-Scholar Resident. Weems’ own The Shape of Things (2021, US, 40 min., digital) an extended meditation on anti-Black violence and Black resilience across time and space, precedes Quentin Tarantino’s revenge epic Django Unchained (2012, US, 165 min., digital).
This screening foregrounds Weems’ McCormack residency at Skidmore, which will culminate in a performance entitled Memorial, Memory & Meaning: A Performance with Artist Carrie Mae Weems on Saturday, October 4, at 2 pm, in the Tang.
About the Films
The Shape of Things (2021, US, 40 min., digital) is a three-channel version of a project that acts as a collage of Weems’ visual archive over the previous decade, editing together newly shot and found footage from moments of protest, action, and resistance to white supremacy as well as lingering, loving imagery that evokes Black joy. Weems’ power as an orator is highlighted in the narration, which anchors the many chapters of this forty-minute-long video work. Amidst the political landscape of the Trump presidency and the uprisings of 2020, Weems converted her unease into an extended meditation on anti-Black violence and Black resilience across time and space. The beauty of the human face, the human body, and their movement on high-definition film is presented through a lens of Blackness that both celebrates and mourns the current state of “things.” As in her entire body of work created through the decades, The Shape of Things offers a critique made more potent by moments of intense and overwhelming visual pleasure.
Django Unchained (2012, US, 165 min., digital), written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, features an award-winning cast. Jamie Foxx stars as Django a slave who teams up with bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) to seek out the South’s most wanted criminals with the promise of Django’s freedom. Honing vital hunting skills, his one goal is to find and rescue the wife (Kerry Washington) he lost to the slave trade long ago. When their search ultimately leads to Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), the infamous and brutal proprietor of “Candyland,” they arouse the suspicion of Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), Candie’s trusted house slave. Now their moves are marked and Candie’s treacherous organization closes in on them.
About the Artist
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.
About Whole Grain
The Tang Museum’s Whole Grain series explores classic and contemporary work in experimental film and video. Whole Grain is programmed by Assistant Director for Engagement Tom Yoshikami. All events are free and open to the public.