Dionne Lee: Currents

Dionne Lee (born in New York, 1988) works across photography, video, and collage to examine histories of land, power, survival, and Black identity in the American landscape.

Lee’s formal interventions and innovative darkroom techniques—including rephotographing found imagery from wilderness survival manuals and using graphite pencils to create inscriptions on her photographs of the landscape—address themes of dispossession, loss, and resilience. Dionne Lee: Currents, the artist’s first monograph, brings together key works from over a decade of Lee’s career alongside essays by award-winning poet Camille T. Dungy and curator Eric Booker, as well as a conversation between Lee and the artist Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, offering a deeper look at a visionary artist reshaping how we see—and choose to imagine—the great outdoors.

Dionne Lee (born in New York, 1988) is an artist whose work explores power, survival, and personal history in relation to the American landscape. She has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; and New Orleans Museum of Art; among others. Her work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Modern Art, New York, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. Lee is a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow.

Eric Booker is associate curator at Storm King Art Center, New York. Formerly, he was assistant curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem and held positions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Foundation for Contemporary Arts; Calder Foundation; and National Academy of Design, New York.

Camille T. Dungy is a Colorado-based writer. She is author of the award-winning book Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (2023), five collections of poetry, includ­ing America, A Love Story (2026), and the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers (2017). Dungy is a university distinguished professor at Colorado State University.

Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill is a writer and an artist whose sculptural practice explores the history of found materials to investigate concepts of land and property in a capitalist economy. Hill is a member of BUSH Gallery, an Indigenous artist collective that decenters Eurocentric models of making and thinking about art.