“Narrative and storytelling is in the blood,” declares Carrie Mae Weems, taking the viewer on a personal journey through her first major photo-documentary series—Family Pictures and Stories (1978-84)—while recounting childhood experiences of racial discrimination. Her haunting work From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995) appropriates a series of daguerreotypes owned by Harvard University to assess “how the black body had been used in photography.” Instantly controversial, Harvard threatened to sue the artist, to which she responds, “I think that I don’t really have a legal case, but maybe I have a moral case” that can be made about controlling archival images of black subjects by black artists today. The segment also features Weems' recent work Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment (2008), a video and series of photographs for which she enlisted students at the Savannah College of Art and Design to re-stage tragic events from 1968-2008, debuting the work at the 20th National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta. “If I didn’t look at all of that trauma and the sadness of the last forty years,” she confesses, “then I really wasn’t worth my salt.” She decides to continue the project after the 2008 elections, ascertaining that “in one moment there was an enormous shift in the American imagination” where disenfranchised African Americans began to talk about their country with a new sense of agency and belonging. The segment ends at a hotel ballroom in Syracuse, New York, where on a film set she directs actors to "connect with a story that's larger than you" while playing the parts of President Barack Obama, Senator John McCain, Joe the Plumber, and a bevy of Miss Alaska beauty contestants in swimsuits, including Governor Sarah Palin.

Miss Wasilla at Carrie Mae Weems shoot

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Description: Production still © Art21, Inc. 2009 Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 5 | Episode 1: Compassion