Carrie Mae Weems - The Kitchen Table Series

The work presented in the Kitchen Table Series (1990), supplemented with several related works, was created during a richly productive period between 1987 and 1992. During this period Weems expanded the perspective of her work from the personal (her family's experiences) and the political (racism) to broader issues of gender relations, individual identity, and parenting.

"My work reflects my desire to understand my ex-perience in relation to my family and my family's experience in relation to black families in this country.... I am fascinated by the distances between people in the same family, between men and women, and between ethnic groups and nationalities through the use of language derived from experience. There's a certain language that comes out of sharecropping and cotton farming, that comes out of the way men and women, women and children, and women and women share experiences. That's the vitality of language."

Twenty images and thirteen text panels comprise the Kitchen Table Series, which pivots around the experience of one woman (played by Weems) who appears in every frame. Of the fourteen works (three are triptychs), she appears alone in five works, in another five she is joined by one or more other females, while in the remaining four a gentleman is visiting. The square composition remains constant throughout the series: under a single hanging light, one person appears at the far end of a table. Sometimes he or she is joined by others on the sides. There is always a place for the viewer at the near end of the table, which comes right to the edge of the frame, mimicking a seventeenth century still life compositional strategy used to make a scene more intimate. Yet this device also helps us sense the space as a proscenium theatre, a set where the drama will unfold.

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