Setting the Table: Religion in Carrie Mae Weems's "Kitchen Table" (1990) Photography

This paper offers visual analysis of Carie Mae Weems’s now iconic “Kitchen Table” (1990) exhibit and situates the exhibit within a history of 20th-century black photographers who contested visual regimes of white supremacy by training their lens on everyday spaces, habits, and objects. In Weems’s original series of twenty gelatin prints, the kitchen table is a constant but not uncontested focal point. It bears witness to joy and grief, desire and revulsion, laughter and bitterness and ecstasy and agony. For Weems, the table in her home in Syracuse, New York, is a material object and a narrative conceit and a photographic creation. Through all of these registers, she curates the frame with bodies and objects and plays of light to tell a story even as she provokes a disconnect between what beholders see and what she wants them to know.