310

Carrie Mae Weems

1953-

Untitled (ceramic plate with a portrait of Saidiya Hartman). 1990.

Silver print embedded in resin on a patterned ceramic plate
With Weems' signature and date in ink on plate verso.
This work was created as part of the Fine Print Program at Light Work in Syracuse. Though the piece was made as part of a larger project, each plate should be considered unique. The Light Work subscription brochure read as follows: "Playing off the idea of commemorative plates, Weems advances her investigations of racial stereotypes and folklore in these clever and elegant works." Buyers could select to be one or two pieces. The brochure continued, "The pattern in the plate you receive may vary from the one pictured here as each piece is a unique work individually selected and produced by the artist through a special enameling process."
The print 6 1/4 in. (15.9 cm.), the plate 10 1/2 in. (26.7 cm.) in diameter

  • Provenance:
    Former Collection of bell hooks; gifted to the Present Owner 25 years ago
  • Notes:
    Saidiya Hartman is an American academic and writer focusing on African-American studies. She is currently a professor at Columbia University in the English and Comparative Literature Department. She is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford, 1997), Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (2019). She has published articles on slavery, the archive, and the city, including "The Terrible Beauty of the Slum," "Venus in Two Acts" and "The Belly of the World." She has been a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a Fulbright Scholar in Ghana, a Whitney Oates Fellow at Princeton University, and a Rockefeller Fellow at Brown University.
  • Condition: For condition reports, email Deborah Rogal at [email protected]

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October 16, 2025 10:30 AM EDT
New York, NY, US

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