With the Christmas holiday rapidly approaching, a limited audience gathered at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art at Harvard University for a riveting performance of a work challenging issues of race, gender, violence and indefensible doings by segments of the law enforcement community.

For decades, Carrie Mae Weems’s staged photographs and videos have served as aids for processing the legacies of slavery, racism, and sexism in the United States. The elegant solutions in Weems’s compositions, their gravitas and narrative content, appear to operate as historical analyses, reflecting the past more than the present. If there is a call-to-action latent in Weems’s images, I was deaf to it until visiting the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: I once knew a girl… at The Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African-American Art at Harvard University. During the run of the exhibition, a... Read more about Big Red & Shiny: 'Art and Accountability: Carrie Mae Weems and Dell Hamilton Share Space at Harvard '

Dell M. Hamilton’s work draws on not only the historical conventions of photography and performance art but also on the history of black theater, the written and oral traditions of black & Latina women writers as well as the contradiction & exuberance of drag performance. In this interview, we spoke about her practice, our current socio-political landscape, and her recent photo series: Fallen Angels: Making Sense Out of Nothing, which investigates the relationship between persona, performance, and photography through the conflation of characters inspired by Central American folklore,... Read more about Big Red & Shiny: 'STAND UP, Silvi Naci in Conversation with Dell M. Hamilton'

A Zeus, a Jesus, a jester… or is it an evil clown? Actually, it’s President Barack Obama (yes, we can still call him that for a few more precious days)—seen through the lens (literally) of artist Carrie Mae Weems. “The Obama Project” (2016, video installation), on view at The Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African... Read more about Big Red & Shiny: 'See It Before It’s Gone: Carrie Mae Weems'

“Carrie Mae Weems: I once knew a girl . . .” comes in three parts: “Beauty,” “Legacies,” and “Landscapes.” Each is a variation on an inexhaustible theme: the tangled past and no less tangled present of race and gender. The show runs through Jan. 7 at Harvard’s Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art.

On Election Day, it may be worth taking a second look at Carrie Mae Weems’s “The Power of Your Vote,” a video a little over three minutes long intended to galvanize voters.

In the sometime satin and velvet lined world of the visual arts, the impact of the socio-political affairs transmit messages against war, poverty, racism, injustice and imbalance. Some mimic, "art for art sake" in avoidance. Others charge in. Few peal　bell-like in a charming and challenging fashion. When that happens, it's a　peculiar and　alive sort of thing. Such art and artists manifest themselves in a triumphant sort of way, performance like, providing quite the ride...or walk.

There’s a line out the Cooper Gallery’s doors, wrapping back around Peet’s. We’re queuing between those old-style red-velvet aisle markers, printed tickets in hand. When we finally make it inside, they make it worth our while: I sample some kind of fritter that seems to involve crab and wasabi, and a spear of asparagus wrapped in bacon. “How old are you?” the caterer asks as I pluck a glass of wine from his tray. “Twenty-one,” I say, which is true, and he gives me a look of disinterested incredulity but doesn’t ask for ID. I’m probably the only one he had to ask: the crowd in the atrium-like... Read more about Harvard Magazine: “Getting Out of the Way of the Work”

At a recent reception, an eager crowd followed MacArthur “genius” and 2015 W.E.B. Du Bois Medalist Carrie Mae Weems as she wound her way through the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art, stopping frequently to explain the thinking or inspiration behind her work. Many posed for pictures with the artist standing next to her images.

A good story can recast the familiar and reveal something new. Artist Carrie Mae Weems tells a good story. With text, photographs and videos, she recasts the familiar into new stories in which people excluded from power claim their ground.

Carrie Mae Weems: “I once knew a girl...”: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Nov. 10-12, 15-19 and 22-24, The Ethelbert Cooper Gallery for African and African American Art, 102 Mount Auburn St., Cambridge. The Cooper Gallery presents the work of internationally acclaimed photography and video installation artist Carrie Mae Weems. The exhibition highlights her storytelling tableaux that question social constructs of power, race and space and pose a more multi-dimensional concept of humanity.

The Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African-American Art at Harvard last month opened the show “Carrie Mae Weems: I once knew a girl … ,” which focuses on Ms. Weems’s storytelling and how she has challenged prejudice.