Gentle on my Mind: An Evening with artist Carrie Mae Weems

The art of singular American artist Carrie Mae Weems has investigated topics from cultural identity to politics to the consequences of power. Now this “superb image maker and a moral force” (New York Times)makes her National Sawdust+ debut with a new program called Gentle on My Mind. With narratives, photographs, and video, this special, one-night-only show will share the essential role that music has played in shaping both Weems’s life and work. The Craig Harris Band, led by the acclaimed jazz trombonist and composer, will round out the unusual evening.

Through image & text, film, video, performance, and her many lectures, presentations, and culturally significant convenings with individuals across a multitude of disciplines, Carrie Mae Weems has created a complex body of work that centers on her overarching commitment to helping us better understand our present moment by examining our collective past. Determined as ever to enter the picture — both literally and metaphorically — Weems has sustained an on-going dialogue within contemporary discourse for over thirty-five years.

In a review of her groundbreaking 2014 Guggenheim retrospective for the New York Times, art critic Holland Cotter wrote, “Ms. Weems is what she has always been, a superb image maker and a moral force, focused and irrepressible.”

As one off the panelists at the 2016 Arts Summit at the Kennedy Center, the topic discussed was: How Can We Maximize Service in A Creative Life? In her own work, Weems has taken a stand against violence and the perpetuation of a failing system in her community with projects like Operation: Activate, an anti-violence public art campaign and the Institute of Sound and Style, a summer school program she established in 2012 in Syracuse, New York that pays students of lower incomes, ages 15-21, a stipend to learn skills for arts and fashion careers.

Her recent performance, Grace Notes: Reflections for Now combines text, video, & photography, along with music, spoken word and dance.  The piece pays tribute to the Emanual 9, and to the many young black men who’ve lost their lives during this period of escalating violence more specifically, the performance considers the role of grace in the pursuit of democracy.  Commissioned in 2016, Grace Notes premiered at the Spoleto Festival, has been presented at Yale University Theater, and will be presented in the fall of 2017 at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C.

Weems has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at major national and international museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Frist Center for Visual Art, Nashville; The Cleveland Museum of Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Spain.

She is represented in public and private collections around the world including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Weems has been represented by Jack Shainman Gallery since 2008 and is currently Artist in Residence at the Park Avenue Armory. She lives in Syracuse, New York with her husband Jeffrey Hoone, who is Executive Director of Light Work.

Craig Harris

When Craig Harris exploded onto the jazz scene in 1976, he brought the entire history of the jazz trombone with him.  From the growling gutbucket intensity of early New Orleans music through the refined, articulate improvisation of the modern era set forth by J.J. Johnson, and into the confrontational expressionism of the ’60s avant-garde, Craig handled the total vernacular the way a skilled orator utilizes the spoken word.

He has performed with a veritable Who’s Who of progressive jazz’s most important figures – including Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Sam Rivers, Abdullah Ibrahim,  Jaki Byard, Muhal Richard Abrams, David Murray, Henry Threadgill, Lester Bowie, The WORLD Saxophone Quartet, The Roots, RAKIM and the list goes on and on – his own projects displayed both a unique sense of concept and a total command of the sweeping expanse of musical expression. And it’s those two qualities that have dominated Craig’s past 15 years of activity, bringing him far beyond the confines of the jazz world and into the sphere of multimedia and performance art as composer, performer, conceptualist, curator and artistic director. Projects have included Souls Within the Veil, composed to commemorate the centennial of W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk; Brown Butterfly, a multi-media work based on the movement of Muhammad Ali with video, dance, and music; and God’s Trombones, based on James Weldon Johnson’s classic collection of poems that refigure inspirational sermons by itinerant Negro preachers.