Framed By Modernism - Carrie Mae Weems and Robert Colescott

Carrie Mae Weems and Robert Colescott are two African-American artists who a) have links to the Northwest (Weems was born here in Portland and Colescott taught at Portland State in the late 1950's and 60's) and b) create politically charged art. The Boston Globe also indicated that in 1997, Weems and Colescott became the first African-American artists to appear at the Venice Biennale.

So it was no surprise that right around the 20 minute mark in Saturday's on-line video posting, Burning Down the House: Building a Feminist Art Collection, Weems speaks of her 1999 collaboration with Colescott. Colescott had approached her to take photographs of him. As she tells the story the images ended up being somewhat different than what he had originally expected. Thematically, Weems had chosen to explore the attitude of women that at times leave them complicit in their victimhood. During the course of the lecture she spoke of how she thinks it's important as a woman to claim more responsibility for her own actions. Starting with the act of painting and the interaction of the artist and the model but extending it to other aspects of life, she questions how she can relinquish authority and power to men or any other entity in her life that then orchestrates it, that bends it and reflects it to meet its own needs. In a series of three photographs she stands naked in a corner of Colescott's room. He is in the center and in two of them his head is in his hand and in the last he looks out at the viewer while she continues to scrutinize him and his work. The titles of the photographs (one of which is part of today's post) carry the words from her lecture in Brooklyn...

Seduced by one another but bound by certain social conventions./You framed me and I framed you./ And even though we knew better, we continued that time honored tradition of the artist and his model but we ultimately knew we were being "Framed by Modernism"...