On April 25, Carrie Mae Weems will be honored at the 12th edition of the Brooklyn Museum’s annual Artists Ball. But Weems, who has explored subjects like race, gender, identity, politics, and power in her influential photographic, video, performance, and installation work, which she began making in the late 1970s, rejects the notion of the “singular” artist: “I would be absolutely lost without all the other artists upon whose shoulders I either stand or fall,” she says.
So it’s fitting that the Artists Ball is a celebration of not just Weems but the larger spirit of creative community for which she has advocated over the past four decades as an artist, activist, and educator. Mickalene Thomas has been enlisted to reimagine the museum’s Beaux-Arts Court for the ball. She credits a 1994 exhibition of Weems’s The Kitchen Table Series, a cycle of photographs and text panels in which Weems plays the role of a woman whose life unfolds in a single domestic space, with influencing the trajectory of her own creative practice. The event is also sponsored by Dior. The house’s creative director, Maria Grazia Chiuri, was an honoree last year. Since her arrival at Dior in 2016, Chiuri has consistently used the runway to highlight the artistic efforts of other women, from legends like Judy Chicago and Penny Slinger, who have each designed sets for Chiuri’s shows, to contemporary talent like Joana Vasconcelos, who created an enormous fabric installation covered in crochet, lace, fringe, and sequins for the Fall 2023 presentation.
Thomas herself has collaborated with Chiuri and Dior three times now, most recently on the spring couture show in Paris this past January. Chiuri’s collection was an homage to the Jazz Age inspired, in part, by Josephine Baker, the American singer and dancer who became one of the biggest stars of les Années Folles, the French equivalent of the Roaring ’20s. The backdrop was a group of oversize portraits of Baker and 12 other groundbreaking women of color, including Dorothy Dandridge, Eartha Kitt, Donyale Luna, Nina Simone, and Naomi Sims. The large-scale pieces, conceived by Thomas, were fabricated by the women of Chanakya, a family-run embroidery atelier and school in Mumbai that Chiuri has worked with frequently during her tenure at Dior.
The social potential of art has been important for Weems. One of the key components of her 2014 retrospective at New York’s Guggenheim Museum was “Carrie Mae Weems Live,” a three-day cultural conference that brought together a diverse range of artists and thinkers—among them, Theaster Gates, Rick Lowe, Julie Mehretu, Charles Gaines, musician Jason Moran, curator Thelma Golden, and choreographer Camille A. Brown. (Weems organized a similar program for a 2021 exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory.) In the earliest days of the pandemic, she also launched Resist Covid/Take 6!, a public-art campaign designed to honor frontline workers, encourage mask wearing, and increase awareness of the dangers of the virus in high-risk communities.
Here, Chiuri, Weems, and Thomas discuss why creativity isn’t relegated to studios and ateliers but is an essential way of living in and engaging with the world.
MARIA GRAZIA CHIURI: I love to have conversations with women who work with images of other women. The way we represent women, I think, is very important. I really like to use the fashion show like a gallery more than only a runway, where other artists can use this space to express their creativity. It gives me an opportunity to have a conversation with other artists. Fashion is a territory where you can really explore different disciplines. I am a designer, a creative director, but I don’t like to be alone in a room. I want to share ideas with other people. I want to work as part of a team.
MICKALENE THOMAS: It’s an example of the ways in which we, as women in the world, create platforms for our own work but can also bring into the fold other women who are doing the same thing.
CARRIE MAE WEEMS: One of the things that happens when you decide that collaboration is key to your practice is that you expand the range of your voice. You expand your vocabulary. You expand your understanding of what’s possible. There is this concept of the “singular” artist. But the actuality is that we are all influenced by and borrow from one another in extraordinary ways. I pay a lot of attention to music. I pay a lot of attention to dance, literature, poetry. I would be absolutely lost without all the other artists upon whose shoulders I either stand or fall—because sometimes I do fall. I fall from great heights. But I stand on those shoulders nonetheless. So the nature of collaborating and convening is really important to me because I’m deeply curious about what other artists are doing. I’m curious about why they make the decisions they make, how they build their work
“YOU BEGIN TO WEAVE IN THAT EXPERIENCE FROM BEING OUT IN THE WORLD.”
Carrie Mae Weems
MT: Every time I extend my practice, I come back to my studio and think about how I can integrate the ideas that I’ve learned through working with others to expand my own work. Everything I do is informed by collaboration, community, dialogue, reading, and looking at other artists and thinking about their work.
CMW: You take it all in and then make it your own. You have your own base vocabulary, but something really happens when you begin to weave in that experience from being out in the world—of looking at, learning from, and listening to what’s going on around you.
MT: It’s also why I think it’s important as artists to create space for others who are coming forward so they have the same opportunities.
MGC: That’s what we also try to do in fashion—with the studio, but also with the work that we do in India with the Chanakya school.
CMW: I’ve always been fascinated by how things are made, the way the hand is used in the craftsmanship of the thing.
MGC: Because it is by hand, you feel the human touch. It’s also incredible how much love the people who make the clothes put in what they do—the people in our atelier at Dior but also the women who do the embroidery. In India, in the tradition of embroidery, it’s mostly men. But Chanakya is the first school for women. It creates a space where these women understand they have an opportunity to use their capacity to be independent. It’s about understanding your potential. It’s about self-expression too.
MT: It’s a transformation, right? That’s what seeing Carrie Mae Weems’s work in 1994 did for me. That’s why I’m an artist today. Seeing her work made it seem possible for me.
MGC: Women who inspire me—I need that. They’re what gives me the idea that I can transform myself. Because Dior is so worldwide, it has changed a lot in my life. Before, I’d lived more in Italy, in my comfort zone. But to work in another country with a brand that is so global and travel so much—it gives me the opportunity to meet so many more women and to have so many more experiences.
“BEING CREATIVE IS NOT A THING THAT YOU CAN DO ONE TIME. YOU HAVE TO WORK.”
Maria Grazia Chiuri
CMW: When I’m working, I get up very early every morning. I look at a lot of stuff, but I start with music. I have a set playlist I’ve been listening to for years. Then, after I’ve worked really hard all day, what I’ve noticed is that the gelling of the idea, the real manifestation of it, actually comes when I’m in bed, completely at rest, in this twilight state. It’s like after all the real hard work, the body has to relax. It has to absorb what it has taken in, and then the mind does the work it needs to do to resolve the situation. But that only happens when I’m not at my desk.
MGC: Normally, for me, that happens in the morning when I wake up. Because in the night, sometimes I am quite nervous about something. But when I wake up, it seems, everything becomes clear. It’s like, “Oh, finally I understand what I have to do.”
MT: For me, that spark is what I like to think of as the creative act—the creative act being what you’re describing: the idea that the hard work and energy and process all come together. It’s like this meta space in my mind. It’s in the way my body moves, the way my shoulders are back. It’s like when we step away from the work and we sort of recomplete it through our own being.
CMW: Geri Allen [the late jazz pianist] used to say that it’s important to get out of the way of your work so the work can do its work.
MGC: I think also it’s necessary to have strong discipline. Being creative is not a thing that you can do one time. You have to work at it every day. I think that sometimes, especially in fashion, there is a narrative that a creative director can do a collection with a big idea in one week. But it is not true. The work has a complexity where, without that discipline, it’s impossible to realize a collection or do projects like the one we did with Mickalene.
MT: As a designer, the amount of work you create in a year is huge compared to a visual artist. Dior does seven shows a year, right?
MGC: Yes. And that’s just the shows. There are also shoes, bags. We manage a lot of things. It’s a different process than that of a visual artist, but I think both are very intense. In fashion, we just have a schedule that is tight, so we have to work at a high level in a very short period of time. It’s also about the way you work creatively. There are different parts of the process you have to respect because everyone at every stage needs time to do their work. You have to get your sketches to the atelier on time so they can do what they need to do.
“IT’S IMPORTANT AS ARTISTS TO CREATE SPACE FOR OTHERS WHO ARE COMING FORWARD.”
Mickalene Thomas
CMW: The commercial demands are very different in fashion. We don’t have to come out with new work every couple of months.
MT: Although some galleries would like us to.
CMW: It’s interesting, with the Covid project, I started literally the same day as the lockdown, and I immediately went to my own language. I use image and text, often with a certain lens and criticality. I didn’t know what I was going to do. But I knew that frontline workers and Black and brown people were going to be seriously impacted by the virus, and I knew that I had to speak to my community as quickly as possible about how to safeguard themselves. So I simply brought everything that I’d learned—and every connection that I’d ever made—to bear. I was on the phone 24/7, calling people, telling people about the project, what I was trying to do, so that we rolled it out state by state by state. We finally were able to move it to Europe and into certain parts of Africa as well. I think my years as an educator and working with image and text and using it strategically—all of that served me very well in being able to really push out this project so that it actually went to almost every state in the country.
MT: The foundation I started, Art Is Forward New York, is that for me. I’ve always had the desire to create space and engage with my artist community in a nontransactional way. But I’d been wanting to find a way to create a discourse or a conversation beyond our art or the work we’re making. There was stuff we weren’t sharing about some of the things that weren’t successful in our practices and some of the things that were complicated or that we were uncertain of on the business side of it. We never really talk about that collectively. We just have this assumption of how things operate and work. I didn’t go to school for business, but I found myself running a business, and no one told us how to do that or that it was part of the equation when you were going to be an artist. I just felt like I was making all of these errors, and once I started correcting those errors, I started to build up this information that I realized I needed to share. So I proposed this project to Pratt [Institute] because I have a relationship with Pratt. I’m an alumna. I said, “What if a school provided a postgraduate program that was a workshop mentorship program that allowed the artists to meet with art professionals in the world—curators, directors, businesspeople—to guide them in terms of how to run a studio or what they need to have in place for their business?” So that’s what Art Is Forward is doing. I’ve seen a lot of my friends give up and not want to do art anymore because the business side is overwhelming and stressful—only because they didn’t have the proper tools and information for how to go about things.
CMW: I was talking to a group of younger artists about this just yesterday. We’re not trained as businesspeople. We’re trained as fine artists. But talking about money is crucial to what we do, and it’s also this thing that we’re supposed to be embarrassed about. And so we’re all operating in these little silos where very little professional information is shared, and we don’t know really who to turn to and who to talk to about how to make it through.
MGC: It’s also important not just for younger artists. I know so many women artists in Italy who have been working for a very long time. They’re really resilient. They have continued to work. But it has been so hard for them to not have had support in these areas that you are speaking about—the financial part, the business part.
CMW: I applaud you, Mickalene. I am also so excited that you are working with the Brooklyn Museum on the Artists Ball.
MT: All they had to do was mention that you were being honored, and I said, “What an honor.”
MGC: It’s also fun to celebrate together. That’s super important too.
A version of this story appeared in the May 2023 issue of Harper's Bazaar.
