NEW YORK, NY.- Public Art Fund presents Carmen Winant: My Mother and Eye, the artist’s largest and most wide-reaching public exhibition to date, featuring 11 compositions of more than 1,200 film stills, now on view on 300 JCDecaux bus shelters across New York, Chicago, and Boston.
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For My Mother and Eye, Winant assembled hundreds of stills from films she and her mother each made as teenagers driving across the US: one made by her mother at age 18 on a Super 8 camera and the other made on 35mm film by Winant at age 17. The resulting works explore agency and self-discovery amid familiar American landscapes–from Niagara Falls to the Rocky Mountains, surrounded by cornfields, rolling plains, coastal scenes, and dream-like episodes often seen through the looking glass of a car windshield.
Winant disrupts linear time in My Mother and Eye, creating non-sequential compositions that reflect the cyclical nature of generational stories. Echoing filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein’s practice of montage, her works unfold with their own unique rhythms and poetic aesthetics.
"My Mother and Eye is the most personal work that I've ever created, and yet it will exist in a more public framework than any previous exhibition,” Winant said. "In revisiting these journeys–my mom's and my own–I am grappling with the experience of freedom, kinship, and transformation that we both encountered in the same moment in our lives, a generation apart and under very different cultural circumstances."
The exhibition highlights the ways women experience the world and document their lives. Winant reveals mutual moments of vulnerability, independence, and the overlapping of separate but shared lived experiences between mother and daughter, mapping a journey not just of physical movement, but of emotional and ideological passage.
For Winant, the JCDecaux bus shelters serve not just as platforms for consumer marketing but as spaces for reimagining the role of photography in public space. My Mother and Eye speaks to her interest in the physicality and materiality of photography, and Winant’s creative process–in which she arranges elements by hand–reiterates her commitment to the physical realities of photography. Each composition functions as an experiment in storytelling, where the personal and political intertwine, in ways as simple as the record of two young women crossing state lines.
“My Mother and Eye brings intimate, personal histories into public view. Through the exhibition, Carmen Winant offers a compelling look at the power of self-representation, the essential influence of familial relationships, and the ways in which women document uneven access to our own agency across generations,” said Public Art Fund Senior Curator Melanie Kress.
Public space plays a critical role in Winant’s work, aligning with her desire to bring stories of women and their lived experiences into the public eye.
"The more I work in public space, the more essential it feels," said Winant. "Exhibiting on JCDecaux bus shelters allows the work to connect with people in the flow of everyday life. These are landscapes of personal and political freedom, shared with the public as they travel, commute, and move through the city."
Carmen Winant: My Mother and Eye is curated by Public Art Fund Senior Curator Melanie Kress.
Carmen Winant (b. 1983, San Francisco, California) collects photographs from books, magazines, and pamphlets in the archives of women’s health clinics, education centers, and various intentional communities. When accumulated and assembled in large installations by the hundreds or even thousands, these photographs reflect back to us the ways we tell stories; pass down information; and express the value of different bodies, work, and practices through images.
Winant grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and since 2014, has resided in Columbus, Ohio, where she is the Roy Lichtenstein Chair of Studio Art for Ohio State University.
Winant has exhibited her work widely, including in recent solo exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN (2023); The Dayton Contemporary, Dayton, OH (2023); Gävle Konstcentrum, Gävle, Sweden (2022); and The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA (2022). Her practice has been featured in notable group exhibitions, including Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2024); Her Voice - Echoes of Chantal Akerman, FOMU, Antwerp, Belgium (2023); To Begin Again, ICA Boston, MA (2022-2023); Witch Hunt, Kunsthal Charlottenborg (2021); Being: New Photography, Museum of Modern Art in New York, NY (2018); and In Practice, SculptureCenter, Long Island City, NY (2018).
Winant holds an MFA from California College of the Arts. San Francisco, CA; MA in Visual and Critical Studies. California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA; and BA in Fine Art and Museum Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, CA. Winant was a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in photography and her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico; The Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; and KADIST Collection, San Francisco, CA. Winant is a regular contributor to Frieze magazine and is an essential voice in conversations about photography today.
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