Carmen Winant: The Last Safe Abortion

Focusing on the near-fifty-year period in which abortion was legal in the United States (1973-2022), The Last Safe Abortion recognises the care, advocacy, and community-building of abortion workers. Artist Carmen Winant draws from over a dozen personal, organisational, and institutional archives from across the Midwest, in Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, Kentucky, North Dakota, and Ohio. The photographs themselves are surprisingly regular: women answer the phone, sterilize medical equipment, throw staff birthday parties, offer workshops, and schedule appointments. In centring the tender, quotidian, and routine acts that inform this healthcare work, Winant works to counter the ways anti-choice activists have weaponised photography by proposing a visuality that attends to abortion care.

The Last Safe Abortion presents a selection of this vast collection of photographs, and accompanies an installation of the same name in the 2024 Whitney Biennial.

Carmen Winant (born 1983) is an artist and writer based in Columbus, Ohio, where she is the Roy Lichtenstein Endowed Chair of Studio Art at Ohio State University.