Carrie Mae Weems is best known as a photographer, but she has also made other works. One example is the decorated screen for the installation The Apple of Adam's Eye at the Philadelphia Fabric Workshop and Museum in 1993. This wallpaper was part of the same installation. Rather unusually, Weems appropriated a design by the British artist John Farleigh that was made for the endpapers to a book by George Bernard Shaw. The book, The Adventures of The Black Girl in her Search for God, was published in 1932. Weems chose the design as a backdrop to a display of her own photographs. These were in fact taken on a 'pilgrimage' that she made to the Coast of Ghana, Elmina, the Cape Coast and the Ile de Gorée in 1991. As she put it in an interview with curator Thomas Collins, 'I was a subject in search of myself and attempting to map a new psychological terrain for myself and others. I suppose . . . I'm trying to construct a new prism for looking at certain aspects of African-American culture. The wallpaper is a metaphor for the searching, probing, looking'.