Usdan Gallery Presents Carmen Winant: Double Jeopardy
From March 9–April 25, 2026, Usdan Gallery is pleased to present Double Jeopardy, a new project by Carmen Winant in which the artist for the first time turns to video as both medium and historical subject matter.
Drawing on VHS tapes from the archive of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV), as well as documents from the personal archive of activist Yolanda Bako, Double Jeopardy examines the formation of the domestic violence movement during the 1970s and '80s—a period when feminist organizing, survivor advocacy, and new technology converged under urgent political and social pressures.
With a practice anchored in archival research and the re-imagination of feminist material histories, Winant is celebrated for large-scale collage installations and artist’s books that recontextualize existing photographic imagery. In Double Jeopardy, she extends her inquiry into video by digitizing and applying her collagist strategies to more than 200 cassettes held in NCADV storage, footage unseen for decades.
The resulting artworks—a vast array of video-still portraits and three videos, respectively, of women’s groups, men’s groups, and audiences listening to accounts of trauma and recovery—form the core of Double Jeopardy. They underscore the simultaneous emergence of the domestic violence movement and video as a DIY medium crucial to supporting the grassroots efforts of the movement itself.
Complementing the video content are framed collages of documents from Bako’s archive, paired with short texts from interviews conducted by the artist. These intimate works offer a singular narrative of one woman’s life in the movement. Extending the exhibition into the campus landscape, a photograph from Bako’s archive appears as a banner on the exterior of the Helen Frankenthaler Visual and Performing Arts Center.
Double Jeopardy marks the second chapter of Winant’s work with NCADV holdings, following a project in 2022. Returning to the archive, she approaches its materials not as historical artifacts to be stabilized but as living records of labor, care, and resistance. The exhibition does not offer closure or resolution. Instead, it proposes a constellation of images and voices that make visible the often-unacknowledged work of survivors and advocates that laid the foundation for ongoing struggles toward safety, justice, and autonomy.
Double Jeopardy is curated by Anne Thompson, Director and Curator of Usdan Gallery, and generously supported by the Greater Columbus Arts Council (GCAC). A version of Double Jeopardy will travel in fall 2026 to the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, where Winant was a research fellow at the Schlesinger Library, in collaboration with the institute’s exhibition curator, Meg Rotzel.
Carmen Winant (b. 1983) lives in Columbus, Ohio, where she is the Roy Lichtenstein Endowed Chair of Studio Art at Ohio State University. Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York; MSN Warsaw; and in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. She was awarded a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship in photography. Her publications include Instructional Photography: Learning How to Live Now (2021); My Birth, published concurrently with her work of the same name in MoMA’s Being: New Photography 2018; and A Brand New End: Survival and Its Pictures, her first project using the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence archives, produced in conjunction with her 2022 exhibition at The Print Center, Philadelphia. Winant is also a community organizer, prison educator, and mother to her two children, Carlo and Rafa, shared with her partner, Luke Stettner.
Image: Carmen Winant, video still from Double Jeopardy, 2026.
Events:
Opening Reception: Monday, March 9, 6:00–8:00 pm, Usdan Gallery
Artist Lecture: Tuesday, March 10, 7:00 pm, Tishman Auditorium