Assistant Professor Dionne Lee and Associate Professor Carmen Winant have been selected for the 2024 Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial. One of the most prestigious contemporary art exhibitions, the Biennial presents the work of contemporary artists working across media and disciplines, representing evolving notions of American art.
Organized by curators Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, the 81st edition of the show titled, “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” focuses on ideas of “the real” to acknowledge that modern society is at an inflection point brought on by artificial intelligence challenging what we consider to be real. Though the biennial survey has historically focused mainly on American artists, this year about 28% of the cohort hails from outside the U.S.
The honor is especially meaningful for the Ohio State pair because Winant served as Lee’s mentor when she was a young scholar and artist.
“Carmen was my mentor when I was a post-MFA fellow and we also went to the same graduate school, just not at the same time,” Lee said. “She knew before I did that we were both selected for the Whitney Biennial. It was really exciting, and I have leaned on her through the process as someone who is going through the same thing, to keep a level head.”
Winant holds the Roy Lichtenstein Chair in Studio Art in the Department of Art and Lee, jointly appointed in Art and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, joined the faculty in autumn 2023. Winant and Lee were two of just 69 individual artists selected for the 2024 exhibition.
“(Ohio State) is a powerhouse right now,” Lee said when discussing the Departments of Art and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. “It is really rare that something like this has happened before where two people from the same school received this honor.”
Lee’s silent black-and-white video titled ‘Challenger Deep’ depicts the artist’s hands holding dowsing rods in search of water, or what Lee described as the “mythical, ancient practice of water witching.”
“In Challenger Deep, I’m most interested in the push and pull between what sustains and threatens. The groundwater drying beneath the earth’s surface stands in contrast to the rising oceans closing in on our shores,” said Lee in her artist statement. “The final image of this collection, ‘Between your hands in a hearth,’ depicts a billow of smoke rising from an anonymous fist. It features barely legible and fragmented instructions for building a fire, a survival skill that is required to sustain life but also, just as easily threatens it.”
Winant’s piece includes 2,500 prints of ordinary, daily tasks required to provide abortion health care — a project that became much more urgent with the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. Winant worked across the Midwest and the South with the archives of special collections and university hospitals, but predominantly with clinics to collect photographs of staff, physicians and volunteers taken over a 50-year period.
“Now that my work is in the show, I am aware of how many thousands of people are seeing it — almost 10,000 a weekend — and the other artists I get to be side-by-side with,” Winant said. “The fact that I get to undergo this experience with Dionne Lee, my friend and colleague at Ohio State, is the icing on top of this wonderful cake; Dionne is a brilliant artist and human being.”
Lee’s piece, which The New York Times described as “mesmerizing,” was first published in 2019. A native New Yorker, getting to see her work on display during Ohio State’s spring break at the Whitney Biennial was a surreal experience for Lee.
“It is a really deep honor to be included in this longstanding exhibition,” Lee said. “I used to work on the other side of the building (from the Whitney) and went to high school in that neighborhood. It was a really nice full-circle moment and homecoming for me.”
Throughout the experience, Lee said she is grateful for the opportunities that have come with her position at Ohio State and seeing her work be recognized on an international scale. “This gives me a sort of renewed appreciation that this gets to be my job,” Lee said. “I feel very lucky that I am able to be a working artist.”
About the Whitney Biennial
The Whitney Biennial is the longest-running survey of American art and has been a hallmark of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Originally an annual exhibition initiated by the museum’s founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the invitational moved to a biennial format in 1973. More than 3,600 artists have participated in the exhibition since 1937.
