The Brooklyn Rail

Dionne Lee’s first monograph dedicates most of its pages to plates of the artist’s major works of video, photography, and collage from the past decade that interrogate histories of landscape, survival, and Black life in the United States. That history is rife with a tension between nature’s potential as a site of refuge and the reality of America’s violent history of slavery and dispossession. Lee describes this tension as “a conflict of belonging between people and place,” a concept that underpins much of her practice.

The cover presents a detail of a photographic collage, North (2019), which shows the artist’s two arms reaching upward, with her thumbs gently touching and pinky fingers outstretched. Recalling how her ancestors once held their bodies in the very same position to navigate themselves from the South to the North when escaping enslavement, Lee describes how enacting this pose “felt very much like an ancestral portal.” Navigation is a recurring theme throughout the monograph, whether as a symbolic reach northward or in Lee’s use of a dowsing rod in her video Challenger Deep (2019). In a conversation with fellow artist Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Lee asks, “What does it mean to come from a diasporic people, through forced migration, and try to make a home?”

The artist’s voice is central to the monograph, emerging as a frequent reference in contributions by curator Eric Booker and poet Camille T. Dungy. Building on the more scholarly essays by Booker and Dungy, which establish an art historical context and narrative around Lee’s practice, the conversation with Hill explores topics such as landscape, lineage, and grief in the artist’s own words. Their careful dialogue closes the monograph on a reflective tone that both marks Lee’s musings in the present and harkens back to the concepts referenced in her work.

Booker’s essay traces Lee’s engagement with landscape, from a formative video Drafts (2016) that she made as a graduate student at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco to her most recent body of work exhibited in 2025 at Storm King Art Center. Booker curated this presentation, which included fifteen locally-sourced boulders with hand-made drawings etched into their surfaces. The artist coated these rocks in a light-sensitive iron-salt solution, using the cyanotype process, and exposed them from dawn to dusk before rinsing them to develop—in Lee’s words—her “first landscape photograph.” The resulting image in deep indigo captured the changes in sunlight and atmosphere over the course of one day. Over the proceeding months, the color shifted to varied shades of rich blues and weathered browns.

Her etchings on boulders in upstate New York followed a series of rock drawings, such as Untitled Rock Drawing I, that Lee made in 2023. While on a residency with Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech University, in Lubbock, Texas, Lee visited Chaco Canyon, a major cultural center for Ancestral Puebloans. Reckoning with her own inability to access a comparable site of ancestral connection, Lee encountered petroglyphs in the shape of a spiral made by the Indigenous Pueblo peoples. As Lee, Hill, and Booker describe, the spiral came to hold myriad meanings for the artist, including “diasporic place-making” and “a reminder of forced removal of past generations from the land.” After inscribing her own hand-made marks on rocks, Lee administered a spiral shape onto these found natural objects. In Untitled Rock Drawing III (2023), she used water to create a shimmering coil atop the stone, while in Untitled Rock Drawing II (2023), she carefully arranged a piece of string—another motif that appears across her oeuvre.

Lee’s video Currents II (2024) follows a string spiral as it floats down a river, eventually unfurling at the whim of the river’s current. Six stills of this video appear as plates in the book, tracing the spiral’s evolution from circle to line. While Lee’s spiral may evoke Robert Smithson’s canonical Spiral Jetty (1970) and her recent sculptural intervention at Storm King could be read within the legacy of earthworks and Land art, the contributors situate Lee’s practice against the motivations that undergird these movements of the sixties and seventies. As Dungy writes, “She is not reprising the twentieth-century monument-making impulse of notable Earthworks artists. Those modes of looking have wreaked havoc on the landscape and individuals, particularly Black and brown people.”

Booker is careful to align Lee with specific practitioners rather than movements. He considers Beverly Buchanan, whose site-specific sculpture Marsh Ruins (1981) bears witness to the wetlands and histories of enslavement in Brunswick, Georgia, and Andy Goldsworthy, whose transient sculptures are informed by and constructed with organic materials.

Lee’s work is similarly invested in ephemerality. Her cyanotype boulders were eventually flipped over and returned to the land after the run of the exhibition. The water spiral atop her rock drawings evaporated. Even the medium of photography implies an impermanence. To Hill, Lee describes her creative method in terms of “leave no trace,” a language of care and responsibility for the outdoors that is echoed by the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, and others. These “traces” are nonetheless captured in her photographs, assembled into this monograph, the enduring presence of which will allow for continued witness of the artist’s practice.

Still, darkroom photography and collage are crucial spaces for Lee’s interventions into the landscape. In her words, “Engaging in analog processes mirrors the nature of the survival skills I’ve studied.” In the darkroom, Lee manipulates the image, at times adding graphite-pencil in the form of text or as abstract gestures. Produced in complete darkness, one might imagine Lee’s process of applying graphite and other elements as a kind of creative wayfinding.