Over a career spanning more than four decades, Weems has created a complex and multifaceted body of work encompassing photography, film, installation and other media, while engaging with the social and political issues of the present which continue to shape our world today.
The exhibition will open concurrently with Weems’s travelling exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at C/O Berlin during Berlin Art Week 2026, as part of a series of events celebrating her work.
In the series Seaside, Weems revisits her now-iconic strategy of self-portraiture as witness. Photographed from behind on a single beach, the artist appears in moments of quiet reverie facing the ocean’s horizon. Seated at an easel, she attempts to render the vast and unknowable scale of the Atlantic passage. Across the sequence – seated, standing, and ultimately unable to contain the immensity before her – pages from her sketchbook are caught by gusts of wind, underscoring the limits of representation when confronted with histories of displacement and trauma.
The Law of Diminishing Returns comprises five oval-framed photographs that evoke, in miniature form, the passage of human bodies across the ocean. Drawing on early photographic portraiture through their intimate scale, the works meditate on the enormity of global migration – from the transatlantic slave trade to contemporary economic displacement. Their modest dimensions demand close viewing, inviting contemplation and bearing witness to movements of profound historical consequence.
The works on view at Galerie Barbara Thumm are in dialogue with The Long Goodbye, a film commissioned for the opening of the V&A East in London (April-October, 2026). In the film, Weems traces how bodies of water, from their sweeping currents to soft tides, have shaped us, enabling transatlantic migration and continuing to impact communities in east London and beyond. The work explores the creation of new identities and artistic forms by the immigrants who have relocated across oceans, both voluntarily and by force.
Weems celebrates the cultural diversity that connects and underpins the foundations of contemporary cities. Transcending fear and adversity, water and networks of migration are the fuel of global creativity.
Weems has held numerous solo and group exhibitions at institutions including Kunstmuseum Basel, Völklinger Hütte, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, LUMA Foundation, Fondazione Prada, Whitney Museum of American Art, Frist Art Museum, among others. She has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the MacArthur Fellowship and, most recently, the National Medal of Arts in 2024. She was recently commissioned for the Obama Presidential Center and her work is held in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Tate Modern, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She lives and works in Syracuse, New York.
