Weems has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at major national and international museums including the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her work was recently the focus of a major retrospective, Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video, moving to Portland Art Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art and Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford, before ending at the Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2014.
Weems has received numerous awards, grants and fellowships including the prestigious Prix de Roma, The National Endowment of the Arts, the Alpert, the Anonymous was a Woman and the Tiffany Awards. In 2012, Weems was presented with one of the first US Department of State’s Medals of Arts in recognition for her commitment to the State Department’s Art in Embassies program. In 2013, Weems was the recipient of the MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant, as well as the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Weems was honored at the Guggenheim International Gala in November 2014. In February 2015, she received the ICP Spotlights Award at the International Center of Photography, New York.
She is represented in public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Tate, London; Museum of Modern Art, NY and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Weems currently has a solo exhibition at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art, Harvard University, Cambridge, Carrie Mae Weems: I once knew a girl, which highlights her storytelling tableaux that question our social constructs and pose a more multi-dimensional concept of humanity.