RESIST COVID/TAKE 6!

Carrie Mae Weems

Sarasota Art Museum launched its participation in Carrie Mae Weems’ public awareness campaign RESIST COVID/TAKE 6! in July of 2020. The project delivers Weems’ characteristic dual force of powerful, yet sobering image-text unions – here, concerned with COVID-19 and the disproportionate effects on Black, Latinx, and Native communities as a result of healthcare inequities. The campaign also pays tribute to workers within the health and service industries, highlighting the importance we play in not only protecting ourselves, but also those supporting us during the pandemic. The title, TAKE 6!, refers to just one measure we can take, the suggested six-foot distance, to safeguard ourselves and others from COVID-19 exposure.

The larger project includes campaign items, such as buttons, tote bags, fans, bookmarks, and public features. Weems’ campaign was featured in July and October issues of Tempo News and on a billboard near 17th Street and 301 for two months, ending with the conclusion of 2020.

Be on the lookout for future features!

We’ve all been impacted by COVID-19. It’s an ecological health crisis of epic proportion—an international disaster. And yet we have indisputable evidence that people of color have been disproportionately impacted. The death tolls in these communities are staggering. This fact affords the nation an unprecedented opportunity to address the impact of social and economic inequality in real-time. Denial does not solve a problem.

Carrie Mae Weems

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RESIST COVID/TAKE 6! is led by Carrie Mae Weems’ project Social Studies 101, in association with Pierre Loving, and THE OFFICE performing arts + film.

Created as part of her residency with Syracuse University, the project epitomizes Weems’ evolving communication style to reach her target audience – this time, the mass public – through easily distributable materials, such as posters, billboards, flyers, buttons, bags, and magnets.

Museums and cities across the United States, such as the Brooklyn Museum, Portland Art Museum, and Dallas Contemporary, will be joining the Sarasota Art Museum to publicly confront the realities of healthcare inequalities that often go unseen, but are universal amongst our communities.

About the Artist

Widely renowned as one of the most influential living American artists, Carrie Mae Weems examines how our society structures power through deeply embedded stories, images, and ideas. A gifted storyteller who works porously between text and image, Weems has developed a revolutionary approach to the expression of narratives about women, people of color and working-class communities, “conjuring lush art from the arid polemics of identity” (The New York Times). With a complex body of work encompassing photography, text, fabric, audio, digital image, installation, performance, and video, Weems’ work asks us to look deeply at the two-dimensional image, to explore complex realities and revisit unexamined perspectives.

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, the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Spain. Weems has received numerous awards and honors, including the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, the Rome Prize, the U.S. Department of State Inaugural Medal of Arts, BET Honors Visual Artist Award, and W.E.B. Du Bois Medal from Harvard University. She is represented in public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; MoMA, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; MOCA, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Tate Modern, London. Weems resides in Syracuse and Brooklyn, New York. She is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery.

THE OFFICE produces a variety of Weems’ projects, which include her multi-artist, multi-disciplinary performance works Grace Notes: Reflections for Now (premiered Spoleto Festival USA, 2016) and Slow Fade to Black with Geri Allen (premiered BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival 2012); Resist Covid Take 6, her COVID-19 public awareness project; The Future Is Now and I Am It: A Parade to Mark the Moment at the opening festival of the REACH at the Kennedy Center; and unique, expansive gatherings like Carrie Mae Weems LIVE: Past Tense / Future Perfect, a two-day series of presentations, performances, and conversations with artists, activists, curators and others held in association with her 2014 career retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.