Early Life and Education
Weems was born in Portland, Oregon in 1953, the second of seven children to Myrlie and Carrie Weems. After high school she moved to San Francisco to study modern dance. She decided to continue her arts schooling and attended the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. She graduated at the age of twenty-eight with her BA. She received her MFA from the University of California, San Diego. Weems also participated in the graduate program in folklore at the University of California, Berkeley.
While in her early twenties, Carrie Mae Weems was politically active in the labor movement as a union organizer. Her first camera was used for politics rather than for artistic purposes. She was inspired to pursue photography only after she came across The Black Photography Annual, a book of images by African-American photographers. This book contained the work of photographers Shawn Walker, Beuford Smith, Anthony Barboza, Ming Smith, Adger Cowans, and Roy DeCarava, which Weems found inspiring. This led her to New York, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she began to meet a number of artists and other photographers such as Frank Stewart and Coreen Simpson, and they began to form a community. In 1976 Weems took a photography class at the Museum taught by Dawoud Bey. She returned to San Francisco, but lived bi-coastally and was involved with the Studio Museum and a community of photographers in New York.
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