“It’s expedient, just like reducing things to my race or my gender. “I think it’s the easiest way of dealing with me,” Weems said. Still, for an artist whose subsequent works have been set against the monuments of ancient Rome and the museums of Europe-not to mention the fabulous fashion show Weems staged for her 2009 color video “Afro-Chic”-the label “political” can feel constraining. A portrait of a young woman, who is naked and turned sideways in front of the camera, reads, “You became a scientific profile.” Superimposed on another photograph, of an elegantly attired woman gazing frankly ahead, are the words “Some said you were the spitting image of evil.” The original pictures are in the archives of Harvard University, which threatened to sue Weems over their use but ended up acquiring the series for its collection. One such advance followed Weems’s 1995 series “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried,” for which she enlarged daguerreotypes of African-American subjects, colored them red, and overlaid them with text. (The exhibition was organized by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, in Nashville, Tennessee New York is its fifth and final stop.) State Department, and a survey of thirty years’ worth of work that opens this week at the Guggenheim. Since that career-making project, her gimlet-eyed, starkly lyrical meditations on what constitutes ideas of difference have earned her a MacArthur “genius” grant, a Medal of Arts from the U.S. In the process, she elevated the sapless polemics of identity politics to the lush realm of neorealism. Alternating the pictures with framed panels of folkloric text, Weems distilled complexities of race, class, and gender into the story of a black Everywoman who was defined not just by her relationships-as a lover, mother, breadwinner, friend-but by her comfort with solitude.

These weren’t straight-up self-portraits any more than Cindy Sherman’s “Film Stills” were outtakes from movies. In 1990, the American photographer Carrie Mae Weems staged a series of black-and-white scenes at her own kitchen table, starring herself, alone and with other models. Photograph Courtesy Art Institute of Chicago “Untitled (Woman Playing Solitaire),” from the “Kitchen Table Series” (1990), by Carrie Mae Weems.

Weems kitchen table series