Carrie Mae Weems’s Painting the Town documents the traces of a politically charged moment in the recent history of Portland, Oregon where protests in the name of Black lives in the summer of 2020 quickly became a nightly ritual as buildings, authorities, and demonstrators alike armored themselves for gradual escalation. These photographs of boarded-up storefronts with plywood painted to cover the liberatory messages once carried by graffiti stage a confrontation with the material reality of erasure. Unlike much of her photographic work, Weems’s series here is largely evacuated of space and human figures, and is presented in large scale and in full color. This paper considers this shift in light of Weems’s previous interrogations of architecture and urban space in series such as The Louisiana Project, Roaming, and Museums and in conversation with related developments in new art photography from artists such as Thomas Demand and Thomas Ruff, who have been positioned as protagonists of confrontational and surface-oriented work in “the tableau form.” Critically, the approach of Weems’s work in Painting the Town also supports both a formal and a political turn away from a theater of inclusion to a demand for justice, solidarity, and a resistance to erasure. Reading the photographs alongside recent theoretical work from Ruha Benjamin and Xine Yao advocating a renewed attention to the “thin description” of surfaces and to the liberatory potential of antisocial affect among marginalized communities suggests how survival necessitates a move beyond the reparative.
Cover Image: Carrie Mae Weems. 2006. Palazzo Dei Congressi, Mussolini Rome