Carrie Mae Weems (CMW), born April 20th, 1953, is widely considered to be one of the most influential contemporary American artists whose complex body of work—which uses a wide range of mediums including text, fabric, and photography—focuses on inspiring a visual rhetoric concerning the sobering truth of social inequality in America. 

Her body of work in the Ain’t Jokin’ (1987-1988) series challenges stereotypes and societal assumptions placed on African Americans in multiple dimensions: the images, body of text, and a third-dimension of both the image read with the text. The photos and text operate independently, yet together, they form a vessel for the racist jokes and connotations placed upon a particular segment of the population. This in turn serves as a challenge, and revelation, for all of us to examine the underlying racism we harbor and are implicated in. 

In my own work in the series, Ain’t it funny tho, I attempt to create what is called a “relational portrait” to expound upon Carrie Mae Weems’ themes of the challenges of inequity and multiplicity.  So in a sense this is meant to be a dialogue with her work in Ain’t Jokin’. 

This project is also meant to provide what Okwui Enwezor (Nigerian curator and art critic) describes as “pictorial models that would encode signs of societal disorder, decrepitude, and hypocrisy to produce a sense of both anxiety and disidentification”.  With this view, I attempt to explore the black figure in the wider global social discourse—as opposed to CMW’s American context—, the struggles for recognition and citizenship. 

Further, the notion of cultural appropriation and internalized oppression is an important theme throughout these images. How are we (the oppressed) implicated in producing and reproducing prevailing negative beliefs and oppressive systems? How do I appropriate my own suffering, in Faustian fashion, to gain access to privilege? Where does it begin and where does it end? Do I also appropriate my ancestry’s cultural goods and family’s stories, as if they were my own, to appease gatekeepers of status and recognition?