Hammonds House Museum Launches 30th Anniversary Season with Carrie Mae Weems Exhibition, From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried

From the venue:

Hammonds House Museum launches its 30th anniversary season with an exhibition and film by acclaimed visual artist, Carrie Mae Weems at 6:30 p.m., Friday, January 19, 2018. The exhibition, From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, exposes how photography has played a key role throughout history in shaping and supporting racism, stereotyping and social injustice.

The installation is comprised of appropriated museum and university archival photographs of enslaved African and African American people in the American South during the 19th and 20th centuries, now narratively reassembled by Weems. Among the photographs she selected were daguerreotypes commissioned in 1850 by Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz who intended to use as visual evidence supporting his African inferiority theories.