Film, Talk on Artist Carrie Mae Weems Opens “Bridging the Arts”

The spring season of the “Bridging the Arts” program sponsored by Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts and the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center will begin on Tuesday, Feb. 6 with the film “Carrie Mae Weems: Speaking of Art.”

The program will begin at 5:30 p.m. at the Kate, 300 Main Street, Old Saybrook, Conn. Elizabeth Cook (LACFA ’12) will present a brief commentary and introduction to this film.

Weems, considered one of the most influential contemporary American artists, has developed a complex body of art employing photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and video.

In a New York Times review of her retrospective, Holland Cotter wrote, “Ms. Weems is what she has always been, a superb image maker and a moral force, focused and irrepressible.”

The film is the first in the spring monthly series, which follows a successful fall program.

This collaboration with the Kate invites the public to enjoy pre-screening talks followed by an insider’s look at the creative process of artists captured on film.

Tickets may be purchased at the Box Office at the Kate or at http://www.katharinehepburntheater.org.

Film trailer can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtO1pdOiBAg

Weems has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at major national and international museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Frist Center for Visual Art, Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Spain.

She has received numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including the prestigious Prix de Roma, The National Endowment of the Arts, The Alpert, The Anonymous was a Woman, and The Tiffany Awards. In 2012, Weems was presented with one of the first U.S. Department of State’s Medals of Arts in recognition for her commitment to the State Department’s Art in Embassies program.

In 2013 Weems received the MacArthur “Genius” grant as well as the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. She has also received the BET Honors Visual Artist award, the Lucie Award for Fine Art photography, and was one of four artists honored at the Guggenheim’s 2014 International Gala.

She is a recipient of the ICP Spotlights Award from the International Center of Photography, The WEB Dubois Award from Harvard University, and an honorary degrees from California College of the Arts, Colgate University, Bowdoin College, the School of Visual Arts and Syracuse University.

She is represented in public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, both in New York City; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and The Tate Modern, London.

Weems has been represented by Jack Shainman Gallery since 2008, and is currently Artist in Residence at the Park Avenue Armory. She lives in Syracuse, New York, with her husband Jeffrey Hoone who is executive director of Light Work.

Cook, who will discuss Weems’s art and life, is a 2012 graduate of Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts with a major in painting. She also holds a B.A. in History from Yale University, and an M.F.A. in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Cook co-founded in 1996 and is a partner at Diastole Wealth Management. She teaches art history and studio art at Three Rivers Community College, and studio art at Lyme Academy College. In addition, she makes art and blogs about the art world. You can see her work at elizabethcook.com and read her at theleastuntrue.com and dwinvest.com.

The “Bridging the Arts” series has been enhanced through a generous gift, of more than 50 films detailing the lives and artistic processes of well-known and lesser known American artists by Lyme Academy College patrons Henry and Mary Dunn of Old Lyme. The films are now part of a permanent collection owned by the college.