Aperture Releases Dionne Lee: Currents

New York, May 5, 2026—This month, Aperture publishes Dionne Lee: Currents, the first monograph by rising artist Dionne Lee (born in New York, 1988). Lee makes work across photography, video, and collage spanning themes of dispossession, loss, survival, and resilience.

Predominantly rendered in black and white, Lee’s formal interventions and innovative darkroom techniques—including tearing and rephotographing found imagery from wilderness survival manuals and using graphite pencils to create inscriptions on her photographs of the landscape—weave together new narratives that reclaim the great outdoors. Covering a decade of her work from 2016 to the present, Dionne Lee: Currents features her in conversation with artist and writer Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, along with contributions by award-winning poet Camille T. Dungy and curator Eric Booker, who organized Lee’s recent exhibition at the Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York.

This book is made possible thanks to the Joy of Giving Something Award and is supported by the Aperture JGS Book Award. The goal of this award is to support deserving artists whose work holds the potential to shape the field of photography. Dionne Lee: Currents is published by Aperture and available at aperture.org.

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Dionne Lee (born in New York, 1988) works across photography, collage, and video to examine power, survival, and personal history in relation to the American landscape. Her work, alongside the work of Beverly Buchanan, is included in a two-person exhibition at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, opening September 4, 2026. Lee has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Storm King Art Center, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Swiss Institute, New York; SITE Santa Fe International, New Mexico; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Arter, Istanbul; Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey; Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, Ohio; Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; New Orleans Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; and the International Center of Photography, New York, among others. Her work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Gund at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and the Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts, Tallahassee. Lee is a 2025 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.

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About Aperture
Aperture is a nonprofit publisher that leads conversations around photography worldwide. From its base in New York, Aperture connects global audiences and supports artists through its acclaimed quarterly magazine, books, exhibitions, digital platforms, public programs, limited-edition prints, and awards. Established in 1952 to advance “creative thinking, significantly expressed in words and photographs,” Aperture champions photography’s vital role in nurturing curiosity and encouraging a more just, tolerant society.

Aperture’s programs and operations are made possible by the generosity of our board of trustees, our members, and other individuals, and with major support from Bobby Campbell Charitable Fund, Coach, David Dechman and Michel Mercure, Susan and Thomas Dunn, FotoFocus, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, Celso M. Gonzalez-Falla, William Talbot Hillman Foundation, Joy of Giving Something, Anne Levy Charitable Trust, Mailman Foundation, Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, James McKinney, Richard and Ronay Menschel, Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, Robert Motherwell and Renate Ponsold, Neuberger Berman, New York City Council, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts, Ms. Eliot Nolen of the Mary P. Oenslager Foundation Fund, Yesim and Dusty Philip, Theodore and Mary Jo Shen, Diane Sherman, Michael W. Sonnenfeldt/MUUS Collection, Jon Stryker and Slobodan Randjelović, Jane Smith Turner Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and Wyeth Foundation for American Art.

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Press Contacts:
Lauren Van Natten, Aperture, publicity@aperture.org