In the early 1990s, legendary artist Carrie Mae Weems set off for the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia for a cultural, artistic, and spiritual pilgrimage. Many of the Sea Islands are home to the Gullah Geechee people. Descendants of enslaved people from Africa, the Gullah Geechee developed a unique culture, blending West and Central African and Black American traditions, languages, and religious practices. As a young child, Weems remembers her father telling her stories of this thriving community, but her experience as a Black woman living in America made her doubt it existed. By the early 1990s, the islands were sites of contention. Non-Gullah Geechee landowners banned visitors so they could bulldoze cultural sites in private to make room for luxury homes, golf courses, and resorts. Still, Weems needed to visit. She traveled to the islands in disguise, dressed as a day laborer. Weems’s visits to the islands were the basis for her 1992 Sea Island Series, an extraordinary collection of photographs chronicling histories of enslavement and freedom, culture and loss, and the islands as beautifully haunted. 

Weems has suggested that (Box Spring in Tree) is one of the most significant photographs of her career, embodying all the formal qualities of modernist photography. The image is spare, with geometric shapes and planes: a rectangular steel box spring, circular coils, and two trees that add verticality and balance. Untitled also explores subject matter and perspective excluded by modernist art movements: African American experience and culture. Gullah Geechee people placed box springs between trees for spiritual protection: the steel springs would bounce bad spirits back to those that sent them. In one photograph, Weems perfectly captures the modernist aesthetic while keeping alive the cultural memory and power of the Gullah Geechee people. 

-Jill Ahlberg Yohe, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art