I first saw Carrie’s work in the “Black Male” exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1994, although I had been exposed to some of it as a master’s student at CalArts, where she had also studied. It’s important to recognize now, when identity politics are in vogue, that Carrie Mae was making this work 20 years ago, at a time when these issues were not so accepted by the art world. The “Kitchen Table Series,” for instance, is so deeply elegant and affirmative of the “black familiar” decades before this subject matter was in museum shows. That series feels universal and highly culturally specific — grounded in black life — which is no easy accomplishment.

The piece that has really always stood out to me, though, is from the “Ain’t Jokin” series (1987-88), the one with a woman looking into the mirror (“Mirror, Mirror”). It’s a work whose sting resonates today as much as it did 25 years ago, when it was made. And it’s funny because it’s formally not the most elegant of her works, but its succinct, matter-of-fact language — the way the reflection in the mirror cuts through so many of the excesses of beauty and fashion and culture, through notions of beauty that are the foundation of Western art — registers deeply.

Carrie’s influence is wide, and not just in terms of the work being made by young artists who admire her. Her event “Carrie Mae Weems LIVE” at the Guggenheim was the most important cultural conference of that caliber since the Black Popular Culture Conference at the Dia Center for the Arts in 1991. This conference was the trigger for me to investigate my own photographic archive of Ektachrome images, which documented many of our first encounters, and resulted in the book “Today I Shall Judge Nothing That Occurs.” Her presence and work pushes other artists to reflect on ourselves and interrogate our histories.

She doesn’t make concessions and that is part of what makes her a legend. She has never been seduced by fame or prizes or museum exposure. In fact, she occupies those financial and cultural spaces and opens them up to others. Her retrospective at the Guggenheim in 2014 — that could have very easily just been a midcareer exhibition of Carrie Mae Weems. It’s a very different thing to use that opportunity to crack open the edifice of whiteness, if you will, and bring necessary voices into that space.