The artist Carrie Mae Weems, who was awarded a National Medal of Arts earlier this month, has lent images from her landmark Kitchen Table Series (1990) to a national campaign ad supporting Kamala Harris’s run for the US presidency. The video, titled Kamala’s Table, starts airing today (30 October) on streaming and digital platforms in battleground states. It is aimed at urging Black, Latino, Asian and women voters to support the Democratic candidate at the polls on 5 November.
Opening with a slideshow of scenes drawn from Weems’s famous series (which depicts the daily life, worries and joys of a Black woman portrayed by the artist herself), the ad transitions to photographs of Harris during her childhood and on the campaign trail. “The kitchen table. It's where we gather with family. It's where we eat together, pay our bills. It's where Kamala Harris learned the importance of serving the people,” a voiceover narrates. The ad outlines a few of Harris’s key election promises, including tax credits for families and a proposal to give first-time homebuyers up to $25,000 so they can afford the down payment. “Pull up a chair,” the ad says in closing. “At Kamala Harris's table, there's a seat for you.”
“Much like the majority of the country, Kamala Harris was raised in a working-class home. She knows the struggles and hopes of Americans, because she lived them too,” Mark Skidmore, the chief executive of the creative agency Assemble, tells The Art Newspaper. Skidmore wrote the script for the ad with Gina Belafonte, the director and chief executive of Sankofa—a social-justice foundation founded by her father, the late actor and Civil Rights activist Harry Belafonte. “Kamala is someone who worked hard, played by the rules and understands the complex issues facing families today,” Belafonte says.
The ad was produced and directed by the filmmakers Tanya Selvaratnam and Hannah Rosenzweig, who previously worked together on the feature-length documentary Surge (2020), which tracked the record number of first-time women candidates who ran and won seats across the US during the 2018 midterm elections. The Harris ad was commissioned by Communities United, a political action committee that aims to mobilise women, people of colour and younger voters.