Carmen Winant, Arrival, “Carmen Winant: My Mother and Eye,” 2024, (photo by Nicholas Knight / courtesy of Public Art Fund, NY)
Who: Carmen Winant, Melanie Kress
What: Public Art Fund Talk and artist-led tour
Where: Talk: The Cooper Union, Frederick P. Rose Auditorium, 41 Cooper Sq.; tour: West End Ave. between West Sixty-Third & Sixty-Fourth Sts.
When: Talk: Wednesday, March 26, free with advance RSVP, 6:30; tour: Thursday, March 27, free with advance RSVP, 11:00 am
Why: In its continuing mission to bring unique, intriguing, and involving public art to New Yorkers all around the city, which it has been doing since its founding in 1977, the Public Art Fund has been teaming with JCDecaux for several years, placing art in bus shelters in all five boroughs. The latest installation is “Carmen Winant: My Mother and Eye,” consisting of eleven compositions arranged from more than fifteen hundred screen captures taken from films Carmen and her mother took when they were teenagers traveling across the country; Winant’s mother documented her trip from Los Angeles to Niagara Falls on Super 8 in the summer of 1969 with her friend Judy Carter, while Carmen traveled from Philadelphia to Los Angeles with a 35mm camera in 2001.
The montages are on view in three hundred bus shelters in New York, Boston, and Chicago through April 6. You can find Horizon on Prospect Ave. and on Roosevelt Ave., Beach on the Southwest Grand Concourse, Rainbow on Frederick Douglass Blvd. and on Pearl St., Niagara Falls on 180th St. and on Clarkson Ave., Cornfield on Victory Blvd., and Bless Our Happy Home on Myrtle Ave., among other works at other locations.
“I think of myself as a feminist artist who uses art as an expression of my politics,” Winant says in a PAF Instagram post. “That has meant thinking about existing photographs as documents or as tools of the movement, how those pictures resonate now, or what they can tell us about contemporary feminism or the space between feminist movements.”
On March 26, Winant, who was born in San Francisco, grew up in Philly, and is now based in Columbus, Ohio, will participate in a Public Art Fund Talk and experimental lecture about the project, sitting down with PAF senior curator Melanie Kress at the Cooper Union. The next day, Winant and Kress will lead a tour of some of the bus shelters, beginning on the Upper West Side. Both events are free with advance RSVP.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]