Carmen Winant: Passing On @ Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle

Carmen Winant: Passing On 

Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle

Through September 25, 2025

CARMEN WINANT

Passing On [detail], 2022

Ink on newsprint

Courtesy the artist and PATRON Gallery, Chicago

Photo: Luke Stettner

The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington presents Carmen Winant: Passing On, an exhibition of works by CARMEN WINANT (b. 1983, San Francisco, CA; based in Columbus, OH).

Carmen Winant uses photography to explore collective acts of feminist care, survival, and resistance. Her work highlights the role of images in shaping feminist movements, questioning ideas about women’s power, healing, and liberation. Her large-scale photographic assemblages emerge from a research practice at the intersection of past and living archives, and contain thousands of images collected from libraries, advocacy organizations, instruction manuals, and estate sales. These works reference the importance of visual documentation, collection, and preservation in capturing everyday feminist action and care. 

The Henry presents a focused exhibition featuring works from Passing On (2022), a series of collaged newspaper obituaries of influential feminist activists and organizers. The clippings, presented with Winant’s handwritten annotations, reflect on a lineage of non-biological inheritance and how language shapes memory and history.

CARMEN WINANT is an artist and the Roy Lichtenstein Chair of Studio Art at the Ohio State University. Winant's recent projects have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Sculpture Center, Wexner Center of the Arts, ICA Boston, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and el Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo. Winant's artist books include My Birth (2018), Notes on Fundamental Joy (2019), and Instructional Photography: Learning How To Live Now (2021); Arrangements, A Brand New End: Survival and Its Pictures (both 2022), and The last safe abortion (2024). Carmen Winant is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in photography, a 2020 FCA Artist Honoree and a 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters award recipient. She is also a community organizer, prison educator, and mother to her two children, Carlo and Rafael, shared with her partner, Luke Stettner. 

Carmen Winant: Passing On is organized by Nina Bozicnik, Senior Curator, with Em Chan, Curatorial Assistant.

HENRY ART GALLERY

University of Washington

15th Ave NE & NE 41st St, Seattle, WA 98195

henryart.org

Carmen Winant: Passing On

Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle

April 12 - September 25, 2025

Josh Faught: Sanctuary @ Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle

Josh Faught: Sanctuary

Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle 

Through August 3, 2025

JOSH FAUGHT (U.S., b. 1979)

Sanctuary [detail], 2017

Hand-woven, hand-dyed cotton, hemp,

and gold lamé, scrapbooking stikers;

the entire 1999 season of the soap opera

Passions (DVD); the sheet music for 

Peter Hallock's "A Song of Deliverance";

advertisements for The Monastory 

(The Sanctuary); issue six of Pot Pourri,

a sexual questionnaire for the "new age";

an adverstisement for The Date-Record;

giant clothespins, nail polish, and pins.

Henry Art Gallery, Gift of William and 

Ruth True, originally commissioned in 2016 

for Saint Mark's Cathedral, Seattle, WA, 2020.5 

Image courtesy of the artist

JOSH FAUGHT (U.S., b. 1979)

Sanctuary, 2017

Installation view: 

Saint Mark's Cathedral, Seattle, WA, 2017

Image courtesy of the artist

The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington presents an exhibition featuring the work of JOSH FAUGHT (born 1979, Missouri, based in San Francisco, CA). Know for his evocative multimedia creations that blend weaving found objects, and ephemera, Josh Faught examines craft traditions, queer culture, and personal history in ways that challenge systems of classification and highlight structures of support, visibility, and identity.

This exhibition highlights Sanctuary (2017), a monumental tapestry commissioned by Western Bridge for Seattle’s Saint Mark’s Cathedral and now part of the Henry’s collection. Drawing from Faught’s personal collections and local Seattle archives, Sanctuary reflects on how queer communities have created spaces of safety and connection, and how these practices intersect with themes of faith, devotion, and desire. The tapestry features a rich array of found and archival materials, weaving together spirituality, history, and pop culture. These references evoke stories of connection and isolation in queer history as a means to address ongoing questions about safety, belonging, and well-being.

Accompanying Sanctuary is a selection of Faught's recent basket works. These intimately scaled pieces complement the sprawling height of Sanctuary and highlight the artist's exploration of everyday objects as vessels for human emotions and memories.

This exhibition celebrates Josh Faught's ability to intertwine personal and collective narratives, offering visitors an opportunity to reflect on themes of identity, community and memories.

JOSH FAUGHT explores the conjunction between various histories: the history of textiles, sociopolitical histories, and the artist’s personal history. Recent solo exhibitions include Look Across the Water into the Darkness, Look for the Fog, Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2022); Both Things are True, Koppe Astner, Glasgow (2019); Casa Loewe, London (2019); Sanctuary, commissioned by Western Bridge, St Mark’s Cathedral, Seattle (2017); Siyinqaba, US Embassy in Swaziland, Mbabane (2015); BE BOLD for what you stand for, BE CAREFUL what you fall for, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art at the Neptune Society Columbarium, San Francisco (2013); Snacks, Supports, and Something to Rally Around, Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis (2013). Josh Faught has exhibited in group exhibitions at NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen; Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Houston; Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Yerba Buena Center for Art, San Francisco; The New Museum, New York; ICA Boston; The Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Grazer Kunstverein, Graz; Pakville Galleries, Ontario; and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit. He is a professor of textiles and fine arts at the California College of the Arts.

Josh Faught: Sanctuary is organized by Nina Bozicnik, Senior Curator, with Em Chan, Curatorial Assistant. 

HENRY ART GALLERY

University of Washington

15th Ave NE & NE 41st St, Seattle, WA 98195

henryart.org

Josh Faught: Sanctuary

Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle

March 8 - August 3, 2025

Dineo Seshee Bopape, Diedrick Brackens, Ali Cherri, Candice Lin, Christine Howard Sandoval, Rose B. Simpson, Eve Tagny, Sasha Wortzel: Thick as Mud @ Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA

Thick as Mud 

Dineo Seshee Bopape, Diedrick Brackens, Ali Cherri, Candice Lin, Christine Howard Sandoval, Rose B. Simpson, Eve Tagny, Sasha Wortzel 

Henry Art Gallery, Seattle 

February 4 - May 7, 2023 

CANDICE LIN 

Swamp Fat [detail], 2021 

Scagliola, ceramics, earth, clay, mortar, scented lard 

Installation view of Prospect 5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021-22 

University of New Orleans St. Claude Gallery, New Orleans 

Courtesy of the artist and François Ghebaly Gallery 

Photo: Jose Cotto 

Thick as Mud explores how mud animates relationships between people and place, with works by an international roster of artists: Dineo Seshee Bopape, Diedrick Brackens, Ali Cherri, Candice Lin, Christine Howard Sandoval, Rose B. Simpson, Eve Tagny, and Sasha Wortzel. Across multiple geographies and a range of aesthetic approaches—from figurative clay sculpture to audio recordings of the swamp—these artists engage mud as a material or subject that shapes personal and collective histories, memory, and imagination.

Both water and earth, mud exists in an in-between state. As a medium that dissolves binaries, mud invites a blurring of past and present, personal and political, bodies and landscape, feeling and knowing. In various ways, the artworks in Thick as Mud move across these porous boundaries, disrupting finite linear narratives and dominant hierarchies that shape which places and stories matter.

Drawing from her Santa Clara Pueblo heritage, Rose B. Simpson (born 1983, Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico; lives in Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico) engages clay as a medium of ancestral wisdom. Her figural sculptures honor the mutual relationship of the body and the land historically denied within colonial systems.

Similarly, across drawing and sculpture, Christine Howard Sandoval (born 1975, Anaheim, California; lives in Vancouver, British Columbia) uses adobe, a desert building material with close connections to her own familial lineage, to reclaim cultural memory and to address legacies of extractive labor and displacement inflicted by Spanish missions on the Indigenous people of California.

Across her work, Eve Tagny (born 1986, Montréal, Québec; lives in Montréal, Québec) uses the body to investigate the power dynamics inscribed within constructed landscapes. In a new installation for Thick as Mud, Eve Tagny employs both performance video and sculpture—including architectural forms made from cob, a mud-based building material—to explore conditions of alienation and belonging produced through both the visible structures and latent histories of the built environment.

Like Tagny, Ali Cherri (born 1976, Beirut, Lebanon; lives in Paris, France) addresses disrupted landscapes, investigating the political ecologies embedded in these places. In his video installation Of Men and Gods and Mud (2022), Ali Cherri traces the history of the Merowe Dam in northern Sudan through the labor and lives of seasonal mud-brick workers displaced by the dam’s construction.

Mud transmits the living memory of enslavement across time and place in the work of Dineo Seshee Bopape (born 1981, Polokwane, South Africa; lives in Johannesburg, South Africa). Her recent immersive installation, Master dHarmoniser (Ile aya, moya, la, ndokh) is an animated video and sound environment made with soil and water collected from places that played important historical roles in the transatlantic slave trade. 

Similarly, in Swamp Fat (2021), Candice Lin (born 1979, Concord, Massachusetts; lives in Los Angeles, California) plumbs mud as a physical archive that traces histories of race and citizenship. Utilizing clay harvested from nearby Saint Malo, the site of an early Asian American community in the bayou of Louisiana also previously inhabited by enslaved maroons and Indigenous people, Lin’s work memorializes the history of a place threatened by climate change and remembers the transgressive possibilities of the swamp as a place of fluidity and fugitivity.

Sasha Wortzel (born 1983, Fort Myers, Florida; lives in Brooklyn, New York) animates the queer ecology of the swamp through the entangled social and environmental histories of South Florida where she grew up. Sasha Wortzel activates overlapping trajectories of desire, loss, and renewal, disrupting hierarchies of value associated with mud. 

So too does Diedrick Brackens (born 1989, Mexia, Texas; lives in Los Angeles, California) in his textiles, which integrate racial histories of the American South with his own personal mythology, reclaiming the catfish, a muddwelling, bottom-feeding creature, as a vessel of transcendence for the Black queer body.

Palpable across the works, mud becomes an agent of time and transformation, a medium of decomposition and creation. As such, Thick as Mud tracks the afterlives of violence against people and the environment while also evoking the potential for regeneration.

Thick as Mud is organized by Nina Bozicnik, Curator.

HENRY ART GALLERY

University of Washington

15th Ave NE & NE 41st St, Seattle, WA 98195

henryart.org