Artist Talk with Carmen Winant

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Celebrated for a practice deeply rooted in archival research and feminist material histories, artist Carmen Winant talks about her work on the occasion of her solo exhibition Double Jeopardy, on view in Usdan Gallery. In this groundbreaking new project—her first to feature video—Winant examines the often-overlooked history of domestic violence survivor advocacy. 

Working across collage, installation and artist books, Winant's projects recontextualize existing photographic imagery to challenge conventional representations of women’s bodies and narratives. Double Jeopardy centers domestic violence survivor advocates and support workers—many of them survivors themselves—who, in the 1970s and ’80s, collectively built the foundations of this work.

Double Jeopardy, on view through April 25, marks the second chapter of a body of work Winant began in 2022 in collaboration with the archives of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Intrigued by a cache of more than 200 VHS tapes—materials stored away for decades—Winant returned to the archive in 2025. The resulting project traces the early years of a feminist history shaped by women whose daily labor and resilience made safety and justice possible. Winant not only illuminates the experiences of women but also reveals agentic feminist strategies for survival and self-determination in light of patriarchal violence; she makes visible the roots of a movement working toward a more bearable world. 
 
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.