Set the Stage: Examining Artworks
Pick one of the Photographs.
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I want you to pause for 30 seconds, to simply quietly observe the image.
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Then, in the digital composition notebook shared in the Intro lesson, write down the things that you notice and answer the questions.
Continue with the Explore Further Section in the digital composition notebook
using this photo by Portland’s very own Carrie Mae Weems.
May Flowers, 2003, Carrie Mae Weems. Chromogenic print. The J. Paul Getty Museum. © Carrie Mae Weems.
About the Artist: Carrie Mae Weems’s works explore issues of race, class, and gender identity. Weems primarily works in photography and video. Weems’s work specifically looks at history as a way of better understanding our present. Weems once said “Photography can be used as a powerful weapon toward instituting political and cultural change.”
About the Artwork: This photograph is from a nine-part series titled May Days Long Forgotten mounted in frames made by the artist.
The images in this series feature young Black girls in flowered dresses dancing around a maypole or resting on shady lawns. The aesthetic that Weems uses in this series brings attention to 19th-century photographic portraiture, which often used oval or circular frames. By depicting the girls in this antiquated format, Weems presents a harsh irony: in the 19th century, young African American women were much more likely to work as servants in upper-class houses than to appear in formal portraits.