Exhibitions

March 18, 2020 – April 11, 2021. Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington DC

October 19, 2019 – January 12, 2020. Photographer David Maisel’s archive of the Proving Ground project lends rare insight into his encounter with one of the most secretive of American military zones. The archive reveals the depth of his photographic and time-based media investigation of Dugway Proving Ground, a classified site covering nearly 800,000 acres in a remote region of Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert.

December 11, 2019 – April 26, 2020. UC Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive.

September 14 – December 14, 2019. In a remote region of Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert, a classified military site called Dugway Proving Ground remains largely hidden from public view, closed to civilians and rarely seen in the media.

September 13, 2019 – February 2, 2020. The exhibition looks at the phenomenal complexity of life in the twenty-first century and reflects on the ways in which photographers have documented, and held a mirror up, to the world around us.

June 7 – October 5, 2019. Uncovered focuses on contemporary art from the museum’s permanent collection, including selected works in a variety of media by artists from numerous points around the world.

March 27–September 1, 2019. This exhibition celebrates a major gift of photography, donated over a period of several years, from Berkeley collectors William Goodman and Victoria Belco. Curated by Sandra Phillips.

June 8- August 4, 2019. In a dynamic exhibition featuring the work of four prestigious photographers, CPA explores some of the environmental issues challenging the planet today.

Through September 2019. Artists dream dreams no one else has dreamt, conjure visions no one else has seen. They look beyond the horizon and see guideposts yet unseen.

March 9 – May 19, 2019. “Civilization: The Way We Live Now” is a major exhibition, featuring the work of 100 of the world’s finest photographers. It addresses and illuminates major aspects of our increasingly global 21st century civilization. It stresses the fact that contemporary civilization is an extremely complex collective enterprise. Never before in human history have so many people been so interconnected, and so dependent on one another. In science and art, at work and play, we increasingly live the collective life.

March 7 - April 21, 2019. Ghostly Traces explores issues of memory, mortality, and transience in contemporary photography.

March 21 - May 4, 2019 Robischon Gallery is pleased to present acclaimed California artist David Maisel’s, “Atlas.”

October 18, 2018 – February 17, 2019. “Civilization: The Way We Live Now” is a major exhibition, featuring the work of 100 of the world’s finest photographers. It addresses and illuminates major aspects of our increasingly global 21st century civilization. It stresses the fact that contemporary civilization is an extremely complex collective enterprise. Never before in human history have so many people been so interconnected, and so dependent on one another. In science and art, at work and play, we increasingly live the collective life.

November 9, 2018 -March 2, 2019. “Survols: Aerial Photography of Cities” at CAUE92 Galerie, Nanterre, France

June 24 — September 26, 2018. New Territory: Landscape Photography Today is a survey of contemporary landscape photography from around the world. The exhibition of more than 80 photographs will gauge how artists stretch the boundaries of traditional landscape photography to reflect the environmental attitudes, perceptions, and values of our time.

May 19 - August 12, 2018. This exhibition takes an unprecedented look at the productive and dynamic collaboration between photographer and printer, through the lens of the Harvard Art Museums’ Schneider/Erdman Printer’s Proof Collection.

January 4 – February 24, 2018. Haines Gallery is pleased to present Proving Ground, a solo exhibition of new work by photographer David Maisel (b. 1961, New York, NY; lives and works in San Francisco, CA). Best known for his striking aerial photographs that chronicle environments impacted by human intervention, here Maisel debuts a new body of work, fifteen years in the making, investigating the landscape and architecture of Dugway Proving Ground, a classified military site in a remote region of Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert.

September 15 – December 10, 2017. Featuring seventy-one images spanning the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, the works on view in Land and Lens: Photographers Envision the Environment, an exhibition several years in the making, come primarily from the Museum’s rich holdings of historic and contemporary photography. Among the wide range of artists represented are historic figures Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter and Alfred Stieglitz, as well as many contemporaries. Among these Richard Misrach, David Maisel, and James Balog are well known for their concerned image-making.

August 25, 2017 – May 15, 2018.

July 13, 2016 – November 28, 2016. This major exhibition is devoted to artistic portrayals of California’s most precious—and currently scarce—resource. It presents more than 70 works by eminent artists including Ansel Adams, Albert Bierstadt, David Hockney, David Maisel, Richard Misrach, and Carleton Watkins, and features images from a variety of regions around the state, during the Gold Rush to the present. The exhibition offers a compelling aesthetic experience set within debates about water that have spanned the 19th century to the present. It is also accompanied by an array of public programs designed to raise awareness and appreciation of California’s complicated water issues.

May 22 - July 3, 2016. We live in a time when our global culture has subordinated nature. It has become almost impossible to experience unspoilt land, no matter how far we direct our gaze. What remains once humanity and its thirst for action have left the stage, in search of ever greener pastures? With the first part of the project series titled ARENA, Noorderlicht casts a forensic look at the traces left behind in the landscape.

April 30, 2106 – August 7, 2016. Exhibition Curated by Michael Arzt, François Cusset and Camille De Toledo. Featuring works by: Gregory Barsamian, Stefan Brüggemann, Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkacova, CHTO, Jeannette Ehlers, Famed, Rumiko Hagiwara , David Maisel, Álvaro Martínez Alonso, Guido van der Werve.

April 16, 2016 – August 21, 2016. Exhibition curated by Bruno Latour, Martin Guinard-Terrin, Donato Ricci, Christophe Leclercq. Featuring works by: Tacita Dean, Albrecht Dürer, Charles & Ray Eames, Pierre Huyghe, David Maisel, John Martin, Sophie Ristelhueber, Simon Starling, Thomas Struth, Sarah Sze, Thomas Thwaites, The Unknown Field Division, Jeff Wall.

January 7 - March 12, 2016. Haines Gallery proudly presents "The Fall", a series of recent color photographs by California–based artist David Maisel. For nearly three decades, Maisel has created rigorous, captivating aerial photographs of landscapes affected by industry, agriculture, urban sprawl, and other forms of human intervention. Despite the political and environmental underpinnings of these images, Maisel’s work refuses didactic interpretation, evoking instead an experience that the artist has called the “apocalyptic sublime.”

October 30, 2015–February 21, 2016. The photographers in “Photography And The Scientific Spirit” make art in which the scientific or photographic process, or both, is as inventive as the images themselves.

August 28 – November 14, 2015. This solo exhibition leads the viewer on a hallucinatory journey through landscapes in the American West that have been transformed by the physical and environmental effects of industry. It features twenty-eight large-scale pigment prints from The Lake Project, Oblivion, The Mining Project, American Mine, and Terminal Mirage.

June 12 – August 14, 2015. Miller Yezerski Gallery is pleased to exhibit "The Disrupted Landscape" featuring the works of David Maisel, Alex MacLean, Scott Peterman, Holly Lynton and Thomas Jackson.

June 12 – October 17, 2015. The Bates College Museum of Art will present "Points of View", an exhibition of contemporary photography featuring new and recent works by Jay Gould, Gary Green, David Maisel, and Shoshannah White. Viewing elements of the Maine landscape from different levels of scale, each artist explores a different aspect of the boundaries and interrelationships between human activity and the natural world.

May 3 – September 13, 2015. "The Memory of Time: Contemporary Photographs" is a group exhibition exploring the complexity of the medium's relationship to time, memory, and history. Seventy-six works by artists including David Maisel, Sophie Calle, Chuck Close, Moyra Davey, Carrie Mae Weems, Chris McCaw, and more will be presented at the Gallery for the first time in order to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the National Gallery of Art’s photography program.

March 26 - May 3, 2015. Mark Moore Gallery is proud to present "The Fall" a recent series of large-scale color photographs by California–based artist David Maisel. For over two decades, Maisel has rigorously photographed aerial perspectives of landscapes affected by industry, agriculture, urban sprawl and other forms of human intervention. Despite the political underpinnings of these images, Maisel’s work refuses didactic interpretation, arriving instead at a surreal and abstracted intersection of beauty, mystery, and horror that the artist has referred to as the “apocalyptic sublime.”

January 8 - February 28, 2015. "Goethe’s Chamber" is a group exhibition that invites visitors to reconsider vision as an embodied, subjective and durational experience, continuously augmented by emergent technologies and theorized from various vantages throughout the ages. Located at the intersection of science and fiction, the exhibition’s title is an allusion to polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s pioneering work The Theory of Colour (1810).

October 18, 2014 – January 11, 2015. This major survey exhibition of more than 120 works by artists shown at Blue Sky will demonstrate the critical role that the gallery has played in the reconsideration and establishment of photography as a fine art medium.

October 11 – November 23, 2014. “Shadows of the Invisible” explores the ability of photography to reveal what is invisible to the naked eye. A catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

September 13 - December 20, 2014. “David Maisel – Black Maps” is a solo exhibition surveying four chapters of Maisel’s larger ongoing series titled Black Maps. Composed of large-scale photographs, this exhibition leads the viewer on a hallucinatory journey through landscapes in the American West that have been transformed through the physical and environmental effects of industrial-scale water diversion projects, open-pit mineral extraction, and urban sprawl. Maisel’s powerful aerial photographs exist as aesthetic and political archives documenting the impact of both human consumption and inhabitation. More than mere records, these photographs evoke sublime beauty and apocalyptic destruction, positioning Maisel at the forefront of a complex new approach to framing and interpreting issues of contemporary landscape and culture.

August 28 , 2014 – January 15, 2015. The concept of deep time was introduced in the 18th century, but it wasn't until the 1980s that American writer John McPhee coined the term "deep time" in his book Basin and Range. This exhibition, which contains 18 works by 15 artists, looks at the human implications of deep time through the lens of artists who bring together rational and intuitive thinking. Artists featured use a wide range of styles and media but share a common interest in the vast timescale. This exhibition explores the role of the artist in helping us imagine a concept outside the realm of human experience.

Over 70 photographs from the permanent collection of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will highlight imagery both inspired by and of the West. A catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

April 3 – May 10, 2014 Yancey Richardson is pleased to present Historyʼs Shadow, the first exhibition at the gallery by American artist David Maisel. For over twenty-five years, Maiselʼs photographic work has been wide-ranging in scope, and yet deeply focused on what he describes as a “long-term investigation into the aesthetics of entropy, and the dual processes of memory and excavation.” Historyʼs Shadow utilizES x-rays as source material to explore the intersection of scientific research and visual art. The exhibition title comes from a project of the same name, inspired by the artistʼs residency at the Getty Research Institute, during which time he re-photographed x-rays of sculptural antiquities culled from the museum’s conservation archives.

Ivorypress presents the photographic project ToledoContemporánea —curated by Elena Ochoa Foster with the Ivorypress team—which will be part of the exhibition programme celebrating the fourth centennial of El Greco. The project, in collaboration with the Fundación El Greco 2014, offers a contemporary view of the city of Toledo: of its past, present and future realities. Twelve photographers have created photographic series about the Spanish city: José Manuel Ballester, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Matthieu Gafsou, Dionisio González, Rinko Kawauchi, Marcos López, David Maisel, Abelardo Morell, Vik Muniz, Shirin Neshat, Flore-äel Surun and Massimo Vitali, as well as the special collaboration of Michal Rovner and composer and theater maker Heiner Goebbels. The old church of San Marcos, Toledo, is the venue that will host the exhibition of the artists’ works between 18 February and 14 June 2014. Their diverse points of view converge to capture the essence of a city that was once the cultural epicentre of Europe and an example of peaceful coexistence.

January - March, 2014. "History Recast" offers a close examination of the relationship between photography and Roman sculpture in contemporary art. Revisiting the claim made by French critic André Malraux in 1947 that the history of art—in particular sculpture—had become “the history of that which can be photographed,” this exhibition explores how artists today no longer use the camera simply to document sculpture. Instead, they embrace photography to create new visions of iconic objects that call into question how we view our heritage, our systems of knowledge, and ourselves. The exhibition focuses on photographs of objects located in and around Rome, the city’s museums, or collections abroad, casting new light on the Eternal City as a laboratory in which to excavate the past, as well as our lived experience of history.

October 4, 2013 – January 13, 2014. Surveying the Terrain at the Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh, North Carolina explores how contemporary artists are using maps, mapping technologies, cartography, surveying, science and politics to create artworks. The exhibition focuses on the how the artists’ relationships to the Earth, the art they create, and our relationships to each other are condensed, extended, distorted and interpreted by beauty, politics, environmental degradation, poverty, surveillance, privacy and censorship. Artists include David Maisel, Mishka Henner, Matthew Jensen, Alfredo Jaar, Maya Lin, Trevor Paglen, Doug Rickard, and others.

June 1 – September 1, 2013. Composed of large-scale aerial photographs, this exhibition leads the viewer on a hallucinatory journey through sites in the American West that have been transformed through the physical and environmental effects of industrial-scale water diversion projects, open-pit mineral extraction, and urban sprawl. Maisel’s powerful images exist as aesthetic and political archives documenting the impact of both human consumption and inhabitation. More than mere records, these photographs evoke sublime beauty and apocalyptic destruction, positioning Maisel at the forefront of a complex new approach to framing and interpreting issues of contemporary landscape and culture. Maisel’s mineral-based, painterly color prints transform human-altered landscapes into subjects and objects of extreme beauty, while simultaneously unveiling the magnitude of hidden ecological devastation that punctuates the vast interior of the American West. For more information, visit SMoCA.

May 3 – September 15, 2013 "Moving – Norman Foster at the Carré d’Art" – Nîmes Museum of Contemporary Art   Click here for more information

DAVID MAISEL / BLACK MAPS: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime. Premiering at the CU Art Museum, University of Colorado Boulder: February 9 – May 11, 2013. Composed of large-scale aerial photographs, this exhibition leads the viewer on a hallucinatory journey through sites in the American West that have been transformed through the physical and environmental effects of industrial-scale water diversion projects, open-pit mineral extraction, and urban sprawl. Maisel’s powerful images exist as aesthetic and political archives documenting the impact of both human consumption and inhabitation. More than mere records, these photographs evoke sublime beauty and apocalyptic destruction, positioning Maisel at the forefront of a complex new approach to framing and interpreting issues of contemporary landscape and culture. Maisel’s mineral-based, painterly color prints transform human-altered landscapes into subjects and objects of extreme beauty, while simultaneously unveiling the magnitude of hidden ecological devastation that punctuates the vast interior of the American West. For more information, visit the CU Art Museum.

Subverted is a group exhibition with artworks by Edward Burtynsky (Ontario, Canada, 1955), David Maisel (New York, USA, 1961), Nuno Ramos (São Paulo, Brasil, 1960) and Carlo Valsecchi (Brescia, Itay, 1965). The show throws a spotlight on the rapport between man and Nature, a relationship whose dynamic has been radically altered over the last few decades.

August 31, 2010 – January 1, 2011. The exhibition of more than 100 photographs comprising two floors of the museum will feature the first museum showing of David Maisel’s History's Shadow on the first floor, and an extensive selection from his Library of Dust series on the second floor. Maisel’s work focuses on the aesthetics of disintegration, and the dual processes of memory and excavation. Both History’s Shadow and Library of Dust tumble through a rupture in the seam of the world into an altered reality, recognizing remarkable subjects in places where no one had ever thought to look.

Breda Photography Festival, Breda, Netherlands, 2010

September 4 – October 4, 2008. David Maisel’s third solo exhibition at Haines Gallery comprises Library of Dust, a series of large-scale photographs of individual copper canisters, each containing the cremated remains of a patient from an Oregon state psychiatric hospital. The canisters have transformed over time and are now blooming with secondary minerals, causing each to become highly differentiated.

Artists in Residence Open House, May 2008.