When and Where I Enter the British Museum

Carrie Mae Weems is one of the leading artists working in the United States today. Like the other artists exhibited here, she uses a wide variety of media but is best known for her photographs, many of which explore her identity as an African American woman. In 2006, Weems was awarded a scholarship to Rome and took the opportunity to visit several European cities. Here she photographed herself with her back turned and wearing a dark robe, in a range of impressive architectural settings. In this particular image she confronts the British Museum in London with its white ionic columns, streams of tourists, and a banner for an exhibition of Michelangelo’s drawings. Weems stands out from the crowd, yet simultaneously seems invisible, as if unsure how to position herself in relation to this bastion of European colonialism (though by no means unable to face up to it). "It’s fair to say that black folks operate under a cloud of invisibility," Weems recently noted in reference to these photographs, "blackness is an affront to the persistence of whiteness. . . . This invisibility—this erasure out of the complex history of our life and time—is the greatest source of my longing."

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016

Credit Line: Yale Center for British Art, Friends of British Art Fund