By Natalie Krick, May 10, 2025
Carmen Winant’s Passing On consists of eight separate collages made from the New York Times which have been laid out in a fourteen-foot-long horizontal grid. On view until September 25, the entire work holds dozens of obituaries written about women ranging from feminist leaders and activists to musicians, authors and athletes who died since 2015. Some, like Ruth Bader Ginsberg, are iconic but I imagine that the majority of these women are unknown to many (despite appearing in the New York Times). The newspaper clippings are adhered to large stark-white sheets of paper and the margins are filled with Winant’s handwritten notes and questions. Time becomes measured and witnessed: I think about the colossal changes that we’ve experienced since 2015 and how it could have felt like to live through the profound shifts that these women experienced during their lifetimes.
An obituary reduces a life to text and image. We get snippets, a black and white snapshot or two and a life condensed into a narrative. Who decides how many words one gets to sum up a life and who is included? Each woman featured here is extraordinary in the way they worked to create change larger than themselves, and I’m saddened to admit how few of these women are familiar. I am thrilled to learn about them: Dorothy Masuka, the South African pop singer who fought Apartheid; Dr. Barbara Almond who studied maternal ambivalence, and the broadcaster Trinh Thi Ngo who entertained US troops during the Vietnam war while also trying to convince them that the war was wrong, among so many others.
The avalanche of text in this piece and so much to read, to contemplate, to consider is overwhelming. My impatience longs to experience this work in book form instead of the wall--to lounge on the couch in the comfort of home-- but a book can be closed and stowed away on a shelf. A book also, like the original newspapers, cannot present all of these stories at once. “Passing On” does not give us the option to interact with these snippets of life stories as isolated individuals - they are made into a group - a mass - a feminist lineage. We stand, along with these women; we take up space.
Winant is a collector, as artists often are, and the use of archives is a central strategy in her work. The archive conjures a cold sterility: white gloves and the lineage of patriarchal colonialism embedded in institutional collections. Unlike the institutional archive however, Winant’s work as a whole holds a deep intimacy born from the process of creating her own archives from books, newspapers and personal photographs and collecting from women’s organizations (abortion clinics, lesbian separatist communities among others).
This collection of obituaries began as a private ritual for Winant. A daily practice accumulated into a collection of ten years. Winant’s act of gathering feels lived in - newspapers have a connection to the home and the body. Beyond collecting, Winant’s handwriting pokes at the information that is available to us, asking why, filling in the gaps, sometimes creating context. Her annotations range from larger cultural questions (“How many projects of women’s liberation were founded in women’s kitchens and apartment living rooms?”) to personal observations (“This reminds me of my mother’s face”). She is curious, empathetic and generous. The addition of her words reminds us to consider what (and who) these texts leave out. I realize that I am looking at these obituaries through my eyes, looping through her eyes. I’m wondering about the women and about Winant who is wondering about these women. Throughout the piece she notes when she can see a book written by the deceased on her bookshelf, placing her in time and space. As I write I see two of Winant’s books on my bookshelf.
Newsprint naturally fades and yellows over time driven by the paper’s acidity which becomes intensified by light exposure. Many of the newspapers in “Passing On” are less than a decade old but they have aged and transformed due to the fact that she has, quite literally, brought these stories out into the light. The intimacy of her handwritten notes and the physicality of the paper creates a sense of embodiedness that is often missing from mediated information. In a time when information moves at an incomprehensible rate and the physicality of a newspaper (or the written word in any physical form) seems unfamiliar to a younger generation, Winant is practicing a labor of slow and ongoing questioning. The process of collecting, thinking and writing is passed to the viewer, if we take the time. She’s asking us to.
Natalie Krick is an artist and a lecturer at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her work was recently included in the exhibition “Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography and Film” at LACMA.
CARMEN WINANT "Passing On (detail)"2022. Ink on newsprint. Courtesy of the artist.
CARMEN WINANT "Passing On {detail}" 2022. Ink on newsprint. Courtesy of the artist.
CARMEN WINANT "Passing On" 2022. Ink on newsprint. Courtesy of the artist.