Dionne Lee: A Monograph
By (Author) Dionne Lee
Interviewer Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill
Text by Camille T. Dungy
Text by Eric Booker
Text by Eric Booker
Aperture
Aperture
29th July 2026
United States
Non Fiction
Individual artists, art monographs
Paperback
128
Width 266mm, Height 203mm
Dionne Lee's first monograph is a powerful meditation on the tension between the landscape as sanctuary and site of violence for African Americans.
Dionne Lee's work across photography, video, and collage spans themes of dispossession, loss, survival, and resilience. 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-create new narratives that reclaim the great outdoors. Covering a decade of her work from 2016 to the present, Dionne Lee: Currents features contributions by curator Eric Booker and award-winning poet Camille T. Dungy, offering a timely reckoning with land, memory, and identity. It stands as an essential statement on the medium's potential today.
Dionne Lee (born in New York City, 1988) works in photography, collage, and videoto explore power, survival, and personal history in relation to the American landscape. Lee received her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2017. She has exhibited work at Aperture, the Museum of Modern Art, the School at the International Center of Photography, New York; Aggregate Space Gallery, Interface Gallery, Land and Sea gallery, Oakland; and the San Francisco Arts Commission. In 2019, she was an artist in residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, Kingston, New York, and a finalist for both the San Francisco Museum of Modern Arts SECA Art Award and San Francisco Artadia Award. Her solo exhibitionRunning, rigging, wading was an Artforum Critics' Pick in 2019. Lee is a 2025 Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and currently teaches at the Ohio State University. Camille T. Dungy is an award-winning editor, author, and professor at Colorado State University. She is the author ofSoil: The Story of a Black Mothers Garden(2023), Trophic Cascade(2017),Smith Blue(2011),Suck on the Marrow(2010), andWhat to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison(2006). Eric Booker is a curator and writer. He is associate curator at the Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York. Previously, Booker was assistant curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem. His curatorial projects include Method Order Metric at the National Academy of Design Museum; Jamel Shabazz: Crossing 125th, Smokehouse, 19681970, and Regarding the Figure at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Gabrielle LHirondelle Hillis an artist and writer. Her sculptural practice explores the history of found materials to inquire into concepts of land, property, and economy. Often, her projects emerge from an interest in capitalism as an imposed, impermanent, and vulnerable system, as well as in alternative economic modes. Her works have used found and readily sourced materials to address concepts such as private property, exchange, and black-market economies. Hill is a member of BUSH gallery, an Indigenous artist collective seeking to decenter Eurocentric models of making and thinking about art, prioritizing instead land-based teachings and Indigenous epistemologies. Hill is Cree, Metis and English, with maternal roots in the Michel Band and Papaschase.