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Who gets to decide what abortion looks like? In Carmen Winant’s latest exhibition, “The last safe abortion,” on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, a wall of tiled-together photographs offers a sprawling community portrait. A clinic employee cradles a corded phone beside a desktop copy of The New Our Bodies, Ourselves. Two hands press gently on a lower back; another massages a foot. There’s a pile of activist pins; a snowwoman with one fist in the air; a display board of services available at Iowa City’s Emma Goldman Clinic, under the tagline “Health Care for Women, by Women.” The 1,600 or so vintage photos—drawn from clinics, university archives, and historical societies across the Midwest—show the routine day-to-day of meetings and waiting-room decor. In one of these “drugstore prints” (as Winant, an ’80s baby, calls them), a pinned-up quilt with green and red squares bears a four-word benediction: “You are safe here.”
More than a year after the Supreme Court ruled to overturn the constitutional right to abortion, the comfort of that phrase now begs a somber rejoinder: Safe till when? “I’ve been experiencing this whiplash myself for some time now,” says Winant, describing the swing from despair to action-minded resolve she has felt in the years developing the exhibition. The artist is speaking on a recent afternoon from Ohio—a state she has called home for nearly a decade, and one whose draconian abortion restrictions led a 10-year-old rape victim to flee to Indiana last year for medical care. The subject of abortion mirrors another of Winant’s quietly radical projects: My Birth, a monumental collection of birth-related images installed as part of MoMA’s “Being: New Photography 2018.” In some ways, both bodies of work set out to recontextualize a familiar topic by drawing on a haul of existing imagery. But this time around, as the post-Roe ground shifted in real time, she couldn’t let the visual record of abortion care exist solely in the past.
“I’m trained in photography, but I had to reteach myself how to use the camera to make those pictures,” says Winant, referring to a series that fills one oversized bulletin board, taken while visiting a handful of providers in the Midwest. (One has since shuttered.) “I felt like it was really important to demonstrate that, while the archive did cross decades, this is not ossified. This is happening in the present moment, in the present hour.” Another discrete group of images in the show comes from the Friendship Medical Center, a Black-run clinic in Chicago that operated for nearly two decades beginning in the early 1970s.
For Winant, who teaches at Ohio State University, with an endowed position as the Roy Lichtenstein Chair of Studio Art, the importance of community engagement looms large, as she discusses in the conversation below. “I’m not someone who believes that artwork does all the work,” she says, stressing how meaningful it has been to connect with older abortion providers. “I hope I’m not romanticizing it, but I’m looking to find strategies. Emotional strategies for resilience, but also practical, on-the-ground strategies.” The subject of this week’s special election in Ohio comes up: Republican legislators seek to move the goalpost for passing amendments to the State Constitution—from a simple majority to 60 percent—with the underlying intent to thwart a referendum on abortion protections. She points to the sticker on her shirt. “I voted early today,” says Winant, who will spend the intervening days in Minneapolis, hand-taping hundreds of photos to the gallery wall. Given Minnesota’s status as a safe haven for abortion care, it’s a fitting place for the show.
Vanity Fair: In past work, you’ve touched on themes of childbirth, violence against women, and lesbian separatist communities. Is this the first time you’ve directly addressed abortion?
Carmen Winant: I had to ask myself that question too because it’s such a core tenet of my life and of my value structure. So much of my feminism is oriented around reproductive justice and rights. That’s why I trip up at this question because I think to myself, “Yes, of course I have,” but then I’m like, “No, actually—you’ve done this sort of activism, or you’ve donated these works to raise money.” Why has it taken so long for me to figure out how to put it into my artwork or have the bravery required to do that? I’m not really sure I can answer that question, except that it feels really vulnerable. And because it’s so politicized, there’s always the worry of the pushback, or that on my end it’ll feel really heavy-handed.
It’s interesting: Judy Chicago is having this retrospective at the New Museum later this year, and they asked me to write an essay on her Birth Project, and it was really clarifying for me because it became so much about abortion. I was writing the essay as the Dobbs decision was coming down, and was thinking, “How can we think about the Birth Project 50 years out?” And the answer to me was: What is the visuality that attends abortion? Because, of course, the right to be pregnant has everything to do with the right to be unpregnant. This is the first time, directly, that I’ve centered [abortion] as work, but in other ways it feels so entangled for me with everything that you brought up, in and around bodily choice and autonomy but also liberation. It’s easy to do this when you look back retrospectively, and you can line everything up.
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