Monsen Photography Lecture: Carmen Winant

The Henry is excited to welcome distinguished artist Carmen Winant as the 2025 Monsen Photography Lecture speaker. 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.

Winant uses photography to explore collective acts of feminist care, survival, and resistance. 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. Winant’s project, The last safe abortion, featured in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, recognizes the care and advocacy of abortion workers through images collected from personal, organizational, and institutional archives that center the everyday, tender acts supporting this essential aspect of healthcare. Other recent projects examine photographic archives to tell stories about community building among domestic violence survivors, the agency of the birthing process, and the intimate and vital art of craft practices. In this lecture, Winant will explore the notion of feminist inheritance as it pertains to the generational, political, and ideological histories of feminist movements.

A focused presentation of work from Winant’s Passing On series (2022) accompanies the lecture. This work features collaged newspaper obituaries of feminist activists and organizers combined with Winant’s hand-written annotations, creating an homage to a non-biological lineage of historic figures whose remembrance serves as a foundation for a more just future.

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’s 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.