Carrie Mae Weems’ The Kitchen Table Series from 1990 stands as a seminal body of work that transcends traditional portraiture, weaving personal narrative with social commentary. Through intimate, staged tableaux, Weems captures raw emotion, identity, and the quiet power of domestic space, challenging viewers to reflect on race, gender, and memory. Each image, grounded in the everyday setting of a kitchen table, becomes a stage for dialogue—between subjects, between viewer and subject, and between history and the present.
The series exemplifies Weems’ signature use of direct gaze and deliberate composition, transforming a simple table into a site of connection and resistance. Her work invites viewers to reconsider the significance of everyday moments, elevating them into profound statements about resilience and humanity. The Kitchen Table Series remains a cornerstone of contemporary photography, influencing generations of artists and affirming the voice of Black women in visual culture.
Today, as digital platforms amplify artistic expression, revisiting The Kitchen Table Series offers deeper insight into Weems’ enduring legacy. Her 1990 vision continues to inspire, urging audiences to see not just faces, but stories—rooted in truth, dignity, and the kitchen table as a symbol of communal strength.
Carrie Mae Weems’ The Kitchen Table Series 1990 is more than photography—it is a testament to the strength found in shared moments and the stories embedded in ordinary lives. For modern audiences, revisiting this series deepens appreciation for both its artistic brilliance and its enduring message. To explore Weems’ work is to engage with a legacy that continues to shape how we see, remember, and connect.
For this series, Carrie Mae Weems staged and photographed a fictional drama in which she plays the lead. The setting is always the same: a small room with a table and a single overhead light. Other cast members play lovers, friends, and daughters.
From this modest setup, the artist creates an entire world. The kitchen, traditionally considered a female space, has rarely been pictured as a site. The resulting body of work became " The Kitchen Table Series " (1990), both a landmark in Weems's career and in the lives of others.
"I can't tell you how many people I've met in the art world-artists, curators, dealers-that point to 'The Kitchen Table Series' as the one piece that made them know they wanted to be in the arts," said Elisabeth Sann, a director at Jack. Description In Untitled (Kitchen Table Series) Carrie Mae Weems staged and photographed a fictional drama, playing the lead role herself. In the context of a simple setting that remains constant-the artist's own kitchen table-the series explores the shifting roles occupied by the strong central female character: lover, friend, and mother.
Together the images and texts suggest that while. Carrie Mae Weems is among the most talented photographers of the twentieth century. Her career-making project, The Kitchen Table Series, 1990, revels in its simplicity.
In a stripped back scene, Weems rotates people and props, investigating self, relationships, motherhood, and the viewer. Artist Carrie Mae Weems was born in Portland, Oregon, USA. Now in her seventies, she is still actively working, and is considered one of America's most important photographers.
Her Kitchen Table Series was produced over a year from 1989 to 1990. Every day, she took photographs in her own kitchen, centered around a plain wooden table. These unique representations of domestic life in.
News and Events Biography Press Contact Kitchen Table 1990 Slide 1Slide 1 (current slide)Slide 2Slide 2 (current slide)Slide 3Slide 3 (current slide)Slide 4Slide 4 (current slide)Slide 5Slide 5 (current slide)Slide 6Slide 6 (current slide)Slide 7Slide 7 (current slide). The woman, photographer Carrie Mae Weems, sits in front of us at the head of the table, dressed in a shiny V-neck shirt with rolled-up sleeves. With a cigarette between her fingers, she considers the columns of playing cards laid out on the table in front of her.
"Carrie Mae Weems: Kitchen Table Series" is a special volume dedicated to Carrie Mae Weems's celebrated body of work made in 1990. The book features for the first time all 20 photographs and 14 text panels from Kitchen Table Series, one of the artist's earliest series, and includes essay contributions by Sarah Lewis and Adrienne Edwards. e table providing a glowing spotlight on the scene.
The image and text reproduced here are part of Carrie Mae Weems's Kitchen Table Series (1990), twenty photographs and fourteen text panels that weave a thread of narrative storytelling together with visual compositions anchored by the p. Filmed in her Syracuse studio, artist Carrie Mae Weems discusses the impetus for her work The Kitchen Table Series (1990), a photographic investigation of a single domestic space in which the artist staged scenes of "the battle around the family" between women and men, friends and lovers, parents and children. More information and credits.