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[Carrie Mae Weems: "The Kitchen Table Series"]

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About 1990, I think...

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I had been working away,

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living in this small town,

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and had been really thinking a lot about

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what it meant to...

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what it meant to sort of develop your own voice.

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And so, I made this body of work,

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"The Kitchen Table Series".

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It started in a curious way as a kind of response

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to my own sense of what needed to happen--

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what needed to be.

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And what would not be simply a voice for African American women,

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but what would be a voice, more generally, for women.

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I made them all in my own kitchen--

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all in my own house--

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using a single light source,

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hanging over the kitchen table.

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It just sort of swung open, this door of possibility,

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of what I could actually do in my own environment,

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whenever I chose,

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and which ever way I wanted,

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at this very specific...

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or in this very particular place, spot, and moment in time.

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I love this series.

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This is actually a platinum series.

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I think these ideas about the spaces of domesticity

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that have historically belonged to women--

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and it is the site of the battle around the family,

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the battle around monogamy,

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the battle around polygamy,

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the battle between the sexes--

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it's going to be played out, really, in that space.

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It's this sort of, begging the question of,

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"How do we begin to alter the domestic space--"

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"the social living arrangement,"

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"the social contract--"

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"how does that get changed?"

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What I'm suggesting is that

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the sort of war that gets carried on--

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and I think it is a war--

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how do we manipulate and control one another

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and/or participate with one another

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to sort of share in those possibilities

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in those differences.

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The social dynamics that happens between men and women,

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that women hold the key to the bedroom,

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and the keys to the generations,

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while men, of course, hold the keys to power.