Author Description

This Collector's Edition includes the book Kitchen Table Series and this print numbered and signed by Carrie Mae Weems: Untitled (Man Reading Newspaper), 1990/1999, Gelatin silver print, 25.2 x 25.2 cm. The photograph has been printed in 2015 in a limited edition of 25 copies plus 5 Artist Proofs. Kitchen Table Series is the first publication dedicated solely to this early and important body of work by the American artist Carrie Mae Weems. The 20 photographs and 14 text panels that make up Kitchen Table Series tell a story of one woman's life, as conducted in the intimate setting of her kitchen. The kitchen, one of the primary spaces of domesticity and the traditional domain of women, frames her story, revealing to us her relationships-with lovers, children, friends-and her own sense of self, in her varying projections of strength, vulnerability, aloofness, tenderness, and solitude. As Weems describes it, this work of art depicts "the battle around the family...monogamy...and between the sexes." Weems herself is the protagonist of the series, though the woman she depicts is an archetype. 'Kitchen Table Series' seeks to reposition and reimagine the possibility of women and the possibility of people of color, and has to do with, in the artist's words "unrequited love."