Carmen Winant is a writer and visual artist who explores representations of women through collage, mixed media and installation. She is the
Roy Lichtenstein Endowed Chair of Studio Art at The Ohio State University and a 2019
Guggenheim Fellow in photography.
Winant utilizes installation and collage strategies to examine feminist modes of survival and revolt. Her recent projects have been shown at the
Museum of Modern Art,
Sculpture Center,
The Columbus Museum of Art, and
The Wexner Center of the Arts. Winant’s artist books —
My Life as a Man and
My Birth — were published by Horses Think Press, SPBH Editions, and ITI press; her forthcoming artist book will be published by Printed Matter Inc. Winant’s work has been written about in
The New York Times,
The Wall Street Journal,
BOMB,
The Guardian, and
Art in America.
In 2019, Winant published with Printed Matter the book
Notes on Fundamental Joy; seeking the elimination of oppression through the social and political transformation of the patriarchy that otherwise threatens to bury us. She lives in Columbus, OH, with her partner Luke Stettner and her two and four-year-old sons, Rafa and Carlo.
About My Birth
In the final spread of Carmen Winant’s book,
My Birth—a moving interplay of collected photographs and personal writings on the confounding process of labor—a black-and-white image shows a new mother gazing into a hand mirror. On the opposite page Winant offers her own reflection:
“By the time you are reading this, cracked open and flimsy, I will have birthed again. I am no closer to understanding who takes possession of this process, or locating the words to make it known.”
The first part is true: Winant delivered her second son two months ago. But the rest? After a yearlong dive into the subject—combing for vintage pamphlets, sourcing materials from
“OG midwives,” and reading
Margaret Atwood,
Sylvia Plath,
Adrienne Rich, and so many others—the artist seems to have come as close to grasping the unknowable as one can get, thanks to twin projects that have debuted this week. If the book skews intimate (snapshots of her mother’s own home deliveries weave in a rare thread of autobiography), Winant’s debut installation at the
Museum of Modern Art is monumental. Part of
“Being: New Photography 2018,” the collage, also titled My Birth, takes over two facing walls in a narrow 20-foot-long gallery. There, Winant has taped up more than 2,000 found images of women careening through the full, uncensored continuum of birth.
“I’ve never been inside of a project in quite the same way,” Winant says by phone from Ohio, where she is an assistant professor at the Columbus College of Art & Design, referring to the way that real-life experience blurred with the flood of images taking over her studio: women weeping into pillows, collapsing into partners’ arms, submitting to medical devices (bane or blessing of modernity?), and bringing bodies out of their bodies.
Source: Vogue
