She sits at the table, reading a book. She sits at the table with a man, embracing him as he looks down at a newspaper. She sits at the table with two friends, somber, then smiling. She stands alone at the table. She looks straight into the camera’s lens. In her renowned The Kitchen Table Series, artist Carrie Mae Weems conveys the intimacies, meditations, and struggles of a Black woman’s everyday life by placing her at the figurative center of the household: the kitchen table. In these twenty black-and-white images, the woman worries alongside the man, who never looks up from his dinner plate or paper; she does battle with a little girl over what may be homework; she gets her hair done as she takes solace in a cigarette and a glass of wine. The focus on domesticity also begs the question of what the woman encounters in the world outside her household and what it takes to return to this table every day and night. We do not see the woman in a factory, office, or field, but we can understand from these images that her life is constituted by labor, along with pleasure and desire. Beginning a...