In 2025, we acquired an exciting major work by the artist Carrie Mae Weems. Weems has been active since the 1970s, and in the light of the racial reckoning of the past decade, her work is more resonant than ever. Working with photography, video, and installation, Weems is hard to place in a single category. Her work is complex and contains multiple meanings. 

Weems was born in 1953. She studied photography and design at San Francisco City College from 1974 to 1976, and received a BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1981. She began her career largely as a social documentary photographer, and her depictions of Black life both in Africa and the wider African diaspora are of enduring power.

Weems’s most important contribution to the genre of photography, and to our visual culture in general, is as a conceptual artist. She seeks to disrupt white historical narratives and intervene in the cultural institutions that emerged out of white hegemony, inserting her own body and her Black female subjectivity into them. Weems is deeply interested in the relationship between the past and the present, and the way that historical inequalities continue to manifest themselves today. If Weems has a mission, it is broadly cultural and historical; she wants her audience to reimagine the global cultural landscape, dominated by the work of white artists, in a more inclusive and, ultimately, richer manner.

In her ongoing Museum Series, Weems photographs herself on the outside of major Western museums, including the Louvre in Paris and the Galleria Nazionale D’Arte Moderna in Rome, institutions she believes enshrine the unequal power relations within the museum world. In all of the images from this series, she is dressed fully in black, representing her own racial identity. The black stands out against the pale exteriors of the museums, which in turn is emblematic of their whiteness. As the work argues, her Blackness seemingly has no place within the museum; she is the outsider waiting for admission. 

Weems has a longstanding connection to the Bay Area. The photograph recently acquired for our permanent collection is one of two works that she made at the Legion of Honor in September 2024. Here, again, she presents herself on the periphery, embodying the exclusion of Black art and culture from the institutions that continue to be dominated and controlled by white narratives. By bringing her work into museum  collections, she can be a catalyst for the ongoing transformation of the museum space, making it more inclusive and reflective of the lived experiences of underrepresented groups. Weems’s conceptual work does not target the Legion of Honor as an individual museum; rather, it is part of a larger institutional critique, in which she interrogates the notion of access to major European and American institutions as a whole.

The photograph is not a self-portrait. She places her own body within the image, but we can only see her back, as she is facing away from us. Her body’s anonymity functions as a proxy for the Black (and female) artists who have historically been excluded from the museum space. At the same time, her face is pointed toward Rodin’s The Thinker (1904) and the facade of the museum, as if she is in dialectical conversation with them and what they represent. Her sense of exclusion is reinforced by the presence of Rodin’s sculpture, which seems to act as a gatekeeper to the building.

Weems has deliberately chosen to capture the classical colonnade of the museum, representative of the European traditions that inform and characterize our museum’s past and present. Weems is walking toward the museum, but she has not yet reached its entrance. She exists in a liminal space, still waiting to emerge from the threshold and truly gain admission. With this new acquisition, the museum is bringing Weems inside — though her work and the work of other Black women artists remains underrepresented. As we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Legion of Honor, this work contributes to a broader reflection on the museum’s past, its role in the present, and the future we want to create.