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Black and Tanned Your Whipped Wind of Change Howled Low Blowing Itself - Ha - Smack into the Middle of Duke Ellington's Orchestra Billie Heard It Too & Cried Strange Fruit Tears

Red and black colored photograph of an African American man with several scars on his back, the title etched in glass on top of the image.

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  • Red and black colored photograph of an African American man with several scars on his back, the title etched in glass on top of the image.

Date:

1995

Artist:

Carrie Mae Weems
American, born 1953

About this artwork

Carrie Mae Weems pairs photography and text to make incisive comments on race, gender, and the politics of representation. This photograph is part of a project that responds to 19th-century photographic representations of African Americans. For the series, Weems overlaid appropriated photographs of Africans and African Americans with etched texts that lament physical and symbolic violence to the black body throughout history. This photograph’s 1863 source image, depicting an escaped slave named Gordon, was titled The Scourged Back and widely circulated by abolitionists as antislavery propaganda. The text folds the history of subjugation under slavery onto the history of jazz, nodding to Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday, and the latter’s song “Strange Fruit,” a haunting requiem to victims of lynching in the American South.

Status

Currently Off View

Department

Photography and Media

Artist

Carrie Mae Weems

Title

Black and Tanned Your Whipped Wind of Change Howled Low Blowing Itself - Ha - Smack into the Middle of Duke Ellington's Orchestra Billie Heard It Too & Cried Strange Fruit Tears

Place

United States (Artist's nationality:)

Date  Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

Made 1995

Medium

Chromogenic print and sandblasted glass

Inscriptions

Unmarked recto; inscribed verso, on backing board, upper right, in graphite: "1/10"

Dimensions

Image, diameter, sight: Diam.: 45.7 cm (18 in.); Window mat: 59.7 × 49.4 cm (23 9/16 × 19 1/2 in.)

Credit Line

Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund

Reference Number

1996.424

Extended information about this artwork

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email . Information about image downloads and licensing is available here.

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