Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video opened to the public at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City on January 24, 2014. Originating at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee before traveling to the Portland Art Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art and Stanford Universit y’s Cantor Center for Visual Arts, the Guggenheim served as the final stop on the exhibition’s year - and-a-half-long tour. The show certainly garnered attention from media big dogs upon its opening at the Frist Center—as evidenced in a New York Times review by critic Hilary Sheets, a full-page précis in Art in America, features in the Wall Street Journal and on the Huffington Post, among many others—and continued to get good press as it traveled the country. Rightfully so should this exhibition have gained as much media attention as it did: it is the first retrospective of the work of an artist considered by many to be one of the foremost interpreters of the African American experience in contemporary art today. 1 Weems’s photographs, which frequently address issues of race, gender and class, are conceptually and formally poignant. Her photographs are often concise in their illustration, yet remain nuanced in their interpretation. Of course, I could go on and on about Weems’s work for it is an extensive corpus that spans over thirty years and numerous sociopolitical themes. However, that is not my task here—the current retrospective rises to this occasion more succinctly and demonstratively than I ever could with my words. Additionally, Weems has been the subject of much critical discourse for years; the amount of interpretive scholarship on her is perhaps only rivaled by the size of her oeuvre. What is at issue currently in the reception of this retrospective is art criticism itself, in my humble opinion. 1 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, 2013, [press release].