HAVE WE ALL BEEN SLEEPING on Carrie Mae Weems? The question might sound counterintuitive, considering the esteem with which the artist has been held since her emergence in the 1980s if not altogether off the mark, given the successes she has enjoyed in the past year. Highlights include a MacArthur “genius” award, a magisterial display of her “Museum” series at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the star-studded “Past Tense/Future Perfect” conference organized around her work at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the last stop of “Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video,”
em Susan Showalter, John Kudlik, Alexander Kudlik. /em
Susan Showalter, John Kudlik, Alexander Kudlik. By Marian Betancourt, Contributor
On their first date ten years ago in a French restaurant in Pittsburgh, John Kudlik and Susan Showalter, both part Irish, discovered they had something in common. John, a historian, is the great-great-grandson of Daniel Dowd, a farmer who came to America on the
Jeanie Johnston in 1849. When he told Susan his family was from a town in Country Kerry called Ballymacelligot, she said, “You’re not going to believe this, but it is the ancestral home of the Babbingtons,” her mother’s family.