Carmen Winant: Passing On

Mezzanine

April 12, 2025 – September 25, 2025

Carmen Winant (b. 1983, San Francisco, CA; based in Columbus, OH) uses photography to explore collective acts of feminist care, survival, and resistance. Her work highlights the role of images in shaping feminist movements, questioning ideas about women’s power, healing, and liberation. Her large-scale photographic assemblages emerge from a research practice at the intersection of past and living archives, and contain thousands of images collected from libraries, advocacy organizations, instruction manuals, and estate sales. These works reference the importance of visual documentation, collection, and preservation in capturing everyday feminist action and care.

This focused exhibition features works from Passing On (2022), a series of collaged newspaper obituaries of influential feminist activists and organizers. The clippings, presented with Winant’s handwritten annotations, reflect on a lineage of non-biological inheritance and how language shapes memory and history.

This presentation is organized in conjunction with the 2025 Monsen Photography Lecture by Winant on May 8, 2025. This annual lecture brings key makers and thinkers in photographic practice to the Henry. Named after Drs. Elaine and Joseph Monsen, the series is designed to further knowledge about and appreciation for the art of photography.

Artist Bio

Carmen Winant (b. 1983, San Francisco, CA; based in Columbus, OH) is an artist and the Roy Lichtenstein Chair of Studio Art at the Ohio State University. Winant's recent projects have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Sculpture Center, Wexner Center of the Arts, ICA Boston, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and el Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo. Winant's artist books include My Birth (2018), Notes on Fundamental Joy (2019), and Instructional Photography: Learning How To Live Now (2021); Arrangements, A Brand New End: Survival and Its Pictures (both 2022), and The last safe abortion (2024). Winant is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in photography, a 2020 FCA Artist Honoree and a 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters award recipient. She is also a community organizer, prison educator, and mother to her two children, Carlo and Rafael, shared with her partner, Luke Stettner.

CREDITS

Carmen Winant is organized by Nina Bozicnik, Senior Curator, with Em Chan, Curatorial Assistant.

Exhibitions at the Henry are made possible through the generous support of our annual sponsors, 4Culture and ArtsFund.

Carmen Winant: Passing On

Artist Bio

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