The North Star
2022
Carrie Mae Weems American, born 1953
United States
In 1936 Carrie Mae Weems’s grandfather Frank Weems traveled 550 miles to Chicago on foot from Earle, Arkansas, partly with the aid of the North Star, which appears in these seven oval photographs as a cold and abstract promise. Frank Weems had been beaten after organizing a labor strike to protest abysmal wages and working conditions in the cotton fields. For the artist, the abstracted world holds a tremendous yet distant possibility that her grandfather seized step by step.
Inkjet prints (7)