Artists

Carrie Mae Weems

Press release

Carrie Mae Weems’ Cyclorama: The Shape of Things (2021) is a culminating work in an ongoing, four-decade-long career dedicated to probing the jagged history of racial injustice in the United States and the world at large. On view almost continuously in different museum venues since its acclaimed premiere at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, The Shape of Things will return to the city in a special, free-to-the public, presentation at Gladstone, which coincides with the 2024 presidential election and to mark the artist’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery. At this moment of grave political precarity, with democracy itself on the ballot, Weems’ video installation immerses the viewer in a moving visual and sonic evocation of resistance, resilience, and redemption. Projected within a cylindrical structure, The Shape of Things draws its panoramic imagery from the 19th-century cyclorama, a popular form of entertainment comprising a 360° history painting often depicting epic battles and military conquests, frequently, and not unironically here, those from the Civil War. These circular murals and the structures that housed them would travel from city to city across the country, like the circus—another potent source for Weems in her quest to convey the convoluted spirit of our times, when tragedy and absurdity conspire together but cannot, despite all apparent efforts, drown out hope.