Carmen Winant—Double Jeopardy
March 9–April 25, 2026
Opening reception—Monday, March 9, 6-8 pm
Artist lecture—Tuesday, March 10, 7 pm, Tishman Auditorium
In her new project Double Jeopardy, artist Carmen Winant 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. Here, 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 photos and ephemera 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 curator of exhibitions, 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. She was awarded a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship in photography, and her work was featured in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Her publications include Instructional Photography: Learning How to Live Now (2021); My Birth, published concurrently with her work of the same name in Being: New Photography 2018, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and A Brand New End: Survival and Its Pictures, her first project using NCADV archives, produced in conjunction with her 2022 exhibit 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: Detail of Carmen Winant, Double Jeopardy (Women to Camera), installation of video stills, 2026