Syracuse, New York

The Jefferson Suites  1999

Mixed Media:Digital Photographs on Muslin, audio

(size) variable

Courtesy of artist, P.P.O.W. and New York

In The Jefferson Suites, Carrie Mae Weems asks the viewer to think about the ways in which life as we know it will be changed forever by genetic research by looking backwards in history, through the prism of one of this country’s most painful and contested narratives. For generations, descendents of Thomas Jefferson’s slave, Sally Hemmings, have passed along as family history the conviction that Thomas Jefferson fathered at least one child with Sally. Eminent historians disagreed. The speculation finally ended this year when DNA tests showed that Jefferson had indeed fathered a child by Hemmings. In her piece for Paradise Now, Weems has created a lament for the past and future in a series of large-scale photographs silk-screened onto banners and an audio work created in collaboration with the musician James Newton. The spoken narrative written by Weems and entitled "Let the Record Show" will be spoken as a refrain against the backdrop of Newton’s original musical score. Throughout her career, Weems has strived to produce art that focuses on notions of truth as seen through the lens, in her words, of the "artist/woman/other." Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut, and the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Born in Portland, Oregon, Weems graduated from the California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts) in 1981.