Claudia Rankine and Carrie Mae Weems

Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry: Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014), which received the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry; Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2004); PLOT (Grove Press, 2001); The End of the Alphabet (Grove Press, 1998); and Nothing in Nature is Private (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1995), which received the Cleveland State Poetry Prize. Rankine has edited numerous anthologies, including American Women Poets in the Twenty-First Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (Wesleyan University Press, 2002) and American Poets in the Twenty-First Century: The New Poetics (Wesleyan University Press, 2007). Her plays include Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue, commissioned by the Foundry Theatre and Existing Conditions, co-authored with Casey Llewellyn. In 2013, Rankine was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Her honors include fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowments for the Arts. In 2005, Rankine was awarded the Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by the Academy of American Poets. She is currently the Henry G. Lee Professor of English at Pomona College.

Over the past thirty years Carrie Mae Weems has worked toward developing a complex body of art that has employed photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and video. Her work has investigated family relationships, gender roles, the histories of racism, sexism, class, and various political systems. Weems has received numerous awards, grants and fellowships including the prestigious Prix de Roma, the Anonymous was a Woman Foundation, and a Medal of Arts Award from the U.S. State Department. In 2013, Weems was the recipient of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award and the MacArthur Genius award. Most recently, she was honored with the Lucie Award for Fine Art Photography, the BET Honors Visual Arts Award, and the ICP Spotlights Award from the International Center of Photography. She is represented in public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, NY and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Weems has been represented by Jack Shainman Gallery since 2008.