Tangled web
Etched into the glass on the first one are the words “Square-toed and flat-footed we came walking out of the wilderness in twos & fours heading north toward industry toward hope.” The text on the last one reads, “Once out of the storm came the act of naming our voices crackling with resistance rose from deep within and bid us rise & stake our claim block by block.”Īs we read the text etched into the glass on top of these pictures, we quickly see that Weems is poetically alluding to the history of African Americans since the Civil War: “Guarded by Angels of Mercy we cake-walked to Mood Indigo into Shy-Town-The Windy City-Chicago” “Arriving in Bronzeville we became killers of sheep men of letters, women of steel” “Jet Black or Indian Red our scale of values differs from that of the world from which we have been excluded.” In addition, the references to Ellington’s “Mood Indigo,” Davis’s “All Blues,” and pictures of foot washing and a processional covered with glass etched with a page of the score of Ellington’s “Come Sunday” infuse the piece with religious overtones and allusions to the power of music.
#TANGLED WEB SERIES#
The first and last pictures in the series once again reproduce Benson’s photograph of the memorial. Recently acquired by the National Gallery, it consists of seven color photographs, each framed with glass, several of which are etched with Weems’s poetic words.
After the woman suffers a brutal beating, her lover proposes a bold plan - a way she.
Unknown to her, she is also being secretly watched via her webcam. A lonely woman trapped in an abusive marriage finds solace in her online lover - a man she only knows through online video chatting. When she received a commission to commemorate the opening of a library on the South Side of Chicago, Weems returned to The Shaw 54th Regiment Memorial in Untitled, 1996. With Rae Becka, Austin Herring, Jeff Clayton, Desiree Markella. Weems cropped and reprinted Benson’s picture in red and covered it with a sheet of glass etched with the words “Restless through the longest winter you marched and marched and marched.” By focusing on the soldiers, Weems diminishes the heroism of Colonel Shaw, who towers above them in the sculpture, and instead celebrates the African Americans. One of the pictures in the series is a photograph by Richard Benson of some of the soldiers depicted in The Shaw 54th Regiment Memorial. Some of the pictures address photography’s problematic role in perpetuating racist ideas, while others call attention to the unknown African American subjects of now-celebrated pictures, whose images were almost always used without their permission. Weems first used an image of The Shaw 54th Regiment Memorial in her highly acclaimed series From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, 1995–1996, consisting of approximately 30 reproductions of 19th- and 20th-century photographs.