As part of this Architectural League series, Carrie Mae Weems will present her work in a public lecture followed by a conversation with Mabel O. Wilson. Weems is a widely influential conceptual artist — and recipient of the National Medal of Arts — known for work that investigates history, identity, and power. Her artistic practice is primarily photographic but also incorporates text, fabric, audio, installation, and video. Weems’s approach to image-making ranges from staged and serialized narrative to appropriation and adaptation of archival and ethnographic imagery.

The image above is from Weems’s project Painting the Town, a series of photographs of boarded-up storefronts in her birthplace of Portland, Oregon, following the 2020 demonstrations by Black Lives Matter and other groups to protest the murder of George Floyd and structural racism in the U.S.