The rejection of any clear hierarchical structure also plays out in the arrangement of the panels, as there is no discernible compositional privileging of one part of the work over another. Weems’s use of the grid underscores the nonhierarchical qualities of this form, as each unit possesses the same dimensions, and whether a portrait or a monochromatic panel-whether representational or abstract-each panel is identically framed and given equal visual weight. 4 As a system based on serial repetition, the modernist grid in artistic practice can be understood as self-referential and autonomous at the same time it informs the basic structure of the modern world, from systems of technology to the built environment. In her choice of the gridded format, Weems inserts herself into a legacy of artists who have engaged with this basic structure since the early twentieth century.

3 Employing the grid, the monochrome, and photographic portraiture, she points to ways in which color has operated in reference to race in various social and historical contexts while also suggesting more expansive ways to think about color. The photographs, drawn from Weems’s Colored People series (1987–90), portray introspective adolescent boys and girls at an age, as Weems put it, “when issues of race really begin to affect you, at the point of an innocence beginning to be disrupted.” 2 Thus, in Untitled ( Colored People Grid), Weems initiates a dialogue with her own oeuvre, in particular a series whose title, which contains a term commonly used to refer to non-Caucasians from the nineteenth century until around 1960, makes direct reference to race. Weems’s Untitled ( Colored People Grid) presents the viewer with a large-scale grid that brings together eleven photographic portraits of African American adolescents arrayed in an irregular sequence among thirty-one multihued monochromatic panels. 1 Her work often engages multilayered and poetic visual strategies to subvert cultural stereotypes, destabilizing monolithic notions of identity to embrace more complicated ways of seeing and thinking.

Over the past four decades Carrie Mae Weems’s artistic practice has centered on the use of photography to explore issues of race, the body, and the power structures that shape the way we understand the world. Spotlight Essay: Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Colored People Grid), 2009–10Īssociate Curator, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum

Carrie mae weems