Carrie Mae Weems

Over the course of more than thirty years, artist Carrie Mae Weems has produced a provocative body of work that addresses complex legacies of race, gender, and class in the United States. She often combines text with images in her projects, a process that allows her to catalogue and interpret her own experiences as well as those of others. By blending documentary, autobiography, and storytelling techniques, Weems conveys what she has called “real facts, by real people.” 

Blue Black Boy features three identical photographs of an African American child which were shot in black-and-white film and then printed and hand-dyed a deep blue. The young sitter faces the viewer directly, almost as if in the style of a mug shot, and beneath the successive repetitions of his visage Weems has printed the words BLUE, BLACK, and BOY to signal the tint of the photographs, the darkness of his skin, and his gender, even as they open onto other meanings. This triptych is part of the larger photographic series Colored People, from 1987 to 1990. Other works in the series, such as Golden Yella Girl, and Red Bone Boy, are toned with corresponding colored dyes. Reclaiming the term colored people, the artist celebrates the rich variety of skin color that is encompassed by the simplistic term black, while also critiquing the values ascribed within the African American community to pigmentation variances. Weem’s process of “coloring” the prints also underscores the artificiality of such visual distinctions among people. Weems has explained that in Colored People, as well as in other works, she has aimed to “intertwine themes” of identity and history, and to represent them with “overtones of humor and sadness, loss and redemption.”

Dana Miller and Adam D. Weinberg, Handbook of the Collection (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2015), 400.