Wholesale Carrie Mae Weems: The Shape of Things

Carrie Mae Weems has often confronted the uncomfortable truths of racism and race relations over the course of her nearly forty-year career. In The Shape of Things, she focuses her unflinching gaze at what she describes as the circuslike quality of contemporary American political life. For this new work, Weems created a seven-part film projected onto a Cyclorama—a panoramic-style cylindrical screen that dates to the 19th century—where she addresses the turmoil of current events in the United States and the “long march forward.”  Drawing upon news and television footage from the Civil Rights era to the present day, elements of some of her previous films such as The Madding Crowd (2017), in which intellectuals such as James Baldwin discuss contemporary politics, and new film projects that bring us into our tumultuous present, the films in The Shape of Things combine documentary directness with poetic rhythm to create an enveloping experience. The films are narrated by Weems, and the layering of her resonant voice with these densely woven images articulate the dangerous and mounting resistance to the “browning of America.” Former President Donald J. Trump is the implicit grand master of the American circus, with its associated tea parties, alt-right parades, and big lie assaults, all working furiously to combat the fundamental shifts in power that loom. But as Weems shows in these powerful works, America is irreversibly changed and changing. It can’t and won’t go back.