Where do image making and ecology meet—and how is Venus Williams involved?
The legendary tennis player and longtime art collector has lent her voice to a new podcast, Widening the Lens, launched to accompany “Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape,” a multidisciplinary exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. The six-episode series explores the intersection between the arts, activism, and the environment, topics that Carnegie Museum of Art Eric director Eric Crosby says are important not to shy away from. Just as working with a camera can expand one’s point of view, “Widening the Lens” invites viewers to question their sense of perspective and stance. Adds Dan Leers, the Carnegie Museum of Art curator of photography, “The project explicitly looks at how the camera can act as a tool to question inherited narratives about people and ecology and foreground stories that are often overlooked or excluded.”
The podcast features Williams in conversation with renowned artists, writers, and scholars—including A.K. Burns, Raven Chacon, Dionne Lee, Xaviera Simmons, and Sky Hopinka—as they explore colonial legacies, charged landscapes, and more. (There is also a fully illustrated catalog and robust public programming planned around the show, providing multiple points of access.) As Williams explains, her relationship with the outdoors, as well as the arts, has been lifelong, so it felt natural for her to take on a project that explored the various connections between the two.
Vogue: You’re clearly a very busy person. What made you take on this project? What about it felt right to you?
Venus Williams: It’s a real honor to host the Carnegie Museum’s Widening the Lens podcast because it’s really deeply moving. It’s a project that integrates art and the environment and this really beautiful, full-circle storytelling. It’s about being able to provoke a discussion around one of the most critical issues facing the world today, which is our relationship to the environment, and the stories that are being told are so thought-provoking; so many words are being said through an image. Sometimes is dark, but that’s what art does. It makes us take a second look. Sometimes it makes us uncomfortable. I feel like this is one of the best things I’ve ever had a chance to be a part of.