RESIST COVID / Take 6!
The Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice is pleased to join cultural organizations across the country in presenting RESIST COVID/Take 6!, a national initiative created by MacArthur Fellowship-winning artist Carrie Mae Weems and first-of-its-kind visual art installation which started at the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts in New York City.
RESIST COVID / TAKE 6! was a catalyst for discussions happening within communities around the United States in 2020. The project’s purpose was to combat misperceptions about the COVID-19 virus, celebrate frontline workers, raise issues of public health and racial inequities, and underscore how art can function as a public awareness campaign.
RESIST COVID / TAKE 6! allowed the Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice to work with Vanderbilt University, Fisk University, and the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, TN to present an impactful outdoor art experience safely during the COVID-19 pandemic. These partners unveiled a series of vinyl and digital banners that were displayed outside Vanderbilt’s Museum of Art, the Jean and Alexander Heard Library, Fisk University’s St. Elmo Brady Chemistry Building, and the Frist Art Museum in September 2020. The Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice also organized and hosted a series of virtual conversations and artistic collaborations during the span of the project focused on healing during a time of significant social unrest.
With RESIST COVID/Take 6!, Carrie Mae Weems sought to educate BIPOC communities about the disproportionate impact of the deadly virus on their lives and raise awareness of this inequity. Through images drawn from Weems’ vast body of work, the project highlights COVID-19’s astonishing death toll, underscores the importance of social distancing (“Take 6“ refers to the recommended six feet of separation), dispels the myth of false cures associated with the virus, encourages public discussion, and thanks our frontline workers. Weems developed RESIST COVID/Take 6! as Artist-in-Residence at Syracuse University.
About the Artist
Widely renowned as one of the most influential living American artists, Carrie Mae Weems examines how our society structures power through deeply embedded stories, images, and ideas. A gifted storyteller who works porously between text and image, Weems has developed a revolutionary approach to the expression of narratives about women, people of color and working-class communities, “conjuring lush art from the arid polemics of identity“ (The New York Times). With a complex body of work encompassing photography, text, fabric, audio, digital image, installation, performance, and video, Weems’ work asks us to look deeply at the two-dimensional image, to explore complex realities and revisit unexamined perspectives.
Weems has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at major national and international museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frist Center for Visual Art, the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Spain. Weems has received numerous awards and honors, including the MacArthur “Genius“ Fellowship, the Rome Prize, the U.S. Department of State Inaugural Medal of Arts, BET Honors Visual Artist Award, and W.E.B. Du Bois Medal from Harvard University. She is represented in public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; MoMA, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; MOCA, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Tate Modern, London. Weems resides in Syracuse and Brooklyn, New York. She is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery.
-The Lincoln Center