How Do You Measure a Country?
MacArthur “genius” award winner Carrie Mae Weems’s reflections on police violence ask the audience to understand that, yes, brutal violence is America.
Sarah Lewis, a curator and Harvard professor, was standing in the Museum of the Confederacy when she got a call from the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina. Dylann Roof had just killed nine worshippers at the Emanuel AME Church in their city, and the arts organization wanted to commission an artist who could create a piece about “grace in the face of tragedy.”
“I knew immediately that Carrie Mae Weems was the artist for this project,” Lewis said at a performance of Weems’s work at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Tuesday. Weems began her career as a photographer, moving toward installations and video art. For Spoleto, Weems created , a live collage of spoken word, dance, and video. As time went on,.
