Carrie Mae Weems

“Art is the one place we all turn to for solace. We turn to it constantly, whether you are listening to music, or pop in a film; you want to escape reality, and if you thinking deeply, you want to engage in art in a complex way. Art allows us to navigate the more complicated parts of our lives in a way that is more palpable. We don’t go to the movies just to see a movie; we go for the experience. I’m very interested in the experience. Art has saved my life on a regular basis. I wanted to offer that experience to children, to enlist them, to show them the possibilities that are in the arts, to persuade them to pursue it for both their own personal salvation and for changing the way we are understood.”
― Carrie Mae Weems

“I don’t always know what I’m doing. I’m often lost and struggling through a process and a set of ideas and emotions that I don’t always understand. Sometimes it takes me years to really understand what I’ve done… That’s why I think it’s so important to really sort of get out of the way of the work… I simply know that I need to make something…I need to realize something, grapple with something, and I do that…allowing the work to be what it is…allowing the meaning to emerge as it emerges. And maybe five years from now I’ll see something in the work that I really didn’t know that I was after.”
― Carrie Mae Weems