We’re 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 at Lincoln Center.

With Resist COVID/Take 6!, Weems seeks to educate BIPOC communities about the disproportionate impact of this 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.

From the Artist
“We’ve all been impacted by COVID-19. It’s an ecological health crisis of epic proportion—an international disaster. And yet we have indisputable evidence that people of color have been disproportionately impacted. The death tolls in these communities are staggering. This fact affords the nation an unprecedented opportunity to address the impact of social and economic inequality in real-time. Denial does not solve a problem.“ —Carrie Mae Weems 

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. 

Resist COVID/Take 6! is led by artist Carrie Mae Weems’ Social Studies 101 in association with Pierre Loving and THE OFFICE performing arts + film