NEWS

To wander through the Icelandic terrain is to engage with the sublime. Water rushes over falls, it freezes, melts, and calves. Steam vents smolder, volcanoes erupt. The land is alive and seething. Travelers visit to feel compelled by the awe of nature; as they move through these spaces, they encounter a scale that is immense and magnificent. The lungs and heart expand to take it all in.

June 29 – October 20, 2021. The J. Paul Getty Museum has acquired three photographs from Maisel’s Desolation Desert series. The series, aerial images of massive mining facilities in Chile’s fragile Atacama Desert, was supported by the artist’s 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship.

“The majestic beauty of barren landscapes and weapons of mass destruction, revealed in the hands of a master photographer.” —Richard Danzig, 71st Secretary of the Navy

Saturday January 25, 2020. Begins at 4:00PM, Forest Lawn Museum, 1712 S Glendale Ave., Glendale, CA 91205

Friday November 1, 2019. 7:30 PM, Photo Alliance lecture, San Francisco Art Institute, 800 Chestnut St, San Francisco CA.

We are pleased to announce representation of David Maisel (American, b. 1961). Renowned for his stunning aerial photographs, Maisel’s work explores the politics and aesthetics of radically human-altered environments, and how we perceive our place in time via investigations of cultural artifacts from both past and present.

Thursday May 16, 10:00 AM, David Maisel will be participating in a panel titled “Eyes in the Air” at Photo London at Somerset House.

Thursday, October 18, 2018, 6:30 PM Click Photography Festival, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh NC

David Maisel has been named a Guggenheim Fellow for 2018. On April 4, 2018, the Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation approved the awarding of 173 Guggenheim Fellowships to a diverse group of scholars, artists, and scientists. Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, the successful candidates were chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants in the Foundation’s ninety-fourth competition.

Socrates Sculpture Park is pleased to announce a new Broadway Billboard by David Maisel, on view October 6, 2018 to May 1, 2019. Maisel’s Billboard, The Lake Project 62 (detail), is cropped from a photograph within a series of aerial images of a California lake that traces the changes of human intervention on the site.

Friday February 16, 2018, 7:00 PM, In an ongoing celebration of its 10th anniversary, Lapham’s Quarterly and the Starline Social Club are pleased to host David Maisel on Friday, February 16th from 7-9pm.

Thursday November 2, 2017, 4:00 PM, 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge MA 02138

Tuesday November 7, 2017, 4:30 PM, Mahaney Center for the Arts 72 Porter Field Road, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT 05753

Saturday, February 25, 2017, 5:00 PM, LA Art Book Fair, Booth D06, Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, CA. As part of Printed Matter Inc's LA Art Book Fair, photographer and artist David Maisel will be signing copies of his 2013 monograph Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime. Presented by ARTBOOK and Steidl.

Thursday, December 1, 5-7pm, Gund Hall 123 The Urban Theory Lab at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University presents a lecture by David Maisel, Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime. Following the lecture there will be a panel discussion moderated by Neil Brenner and featuring Pierre Bélanger, Rosetta Sarah Elkin, and Sharon Harper.

Friday December 2, 2016, 12:30 PM, Peabody Essex Museum, Morse Auditorium. Explore the nuanced and often fraught relationships between artists and museums within the history of American art at this half-day symposium featuring lectures by leading contemporary scholars and visual artists. Speakers include scholars David Dearinger, Andrew McClellan and artists David Maisel, Rosamond Purcell and Elaine Reichek.

Friday, September 9, 2016, 6:00 PM, Koret Auditorium, de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA. THE THING Quarterly organizes an evening of speakers responding to themes and motifs in the exhibition, Ed Ruscha and the Great American West. Featuring artist David Maisel; Jeff Gunderson, Librarian and Archivist at the Anne Bremer Memorial Library of the San Francisco Art Institute; and Julie Caine, managing producer for Crosscurrents, KALW’s award-winning news-magazine.

Saturday, May 21, 2:30-3:30pm. The American photographer and visual artist David Maisel, whose works explores remnants of civilizations both past and present, will speak with the curator of the Photo London Talks Programme, William A. Ewing. Maisel is rightly celebrated for a number of superb books on landscape, of which the New Yorker wrote enthusiastically of his “geometric geographies." Maisel’s most recent book is "Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime."

Opening reception with the artist: Thursday, January 7, 2016, 5:30 – 7:30 pm Haines Gallery proudly presents "The Fall," a series of recent color photographs by California-based artist David Maisel.

Friday, October 2, 2015, 6:30 PM. “David Maisel: Black Maps And Other Dilemmas”

The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts has selected David Maisel as a member of the YBCA 100 an annual compilation of the creative minds, makers, and pioneers that inspire work at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

David Maisel’s photography featured in the HBO title sequence of True Detective (Season 2)

February 28th, 7:00 PM. As part of the Month of Photography lecture program at the Denver Art Museum, artist David Maisel will give a public lecture discussing his work. Doors open at 6:30 PM.

October 21, 5:30 PM. Artist David Maisel will discuss his work in the gallery where the exhibit “Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime” is on view.

Opening Reception with the artist: Thursday, April 3, 2014, 6–8pm Yancey Richardson is pleased to present History’s Shadow, the first exhibition at the gallery by American artist David Maisel. For over twenty-five years, Maisel’s 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.”

Ivorypress presents the photographic project ToledoContemporánea —curated by Elena Ochoa Foster and Ivorypress—which will be part of the exhibition program 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, Michal Rovner, and Massimo Vitali.

David Maisel a featured speaker at the 2014 National Geographic Photography Symposium, Washington DC. "The history of speakers includes both National Geographic photographers and luminaries of the larger photo world whose work goes beyond what would normally appear in the pages of our magazine. Of the process of choosing which photographers to invite to speak, Elizabeth Krist says: 'It’s the greatest opportunity. We fantasize about all the people in the photography world we would love to have in our living room.' This year, the list includes Hasan Elahi, Wayne Lawrence, Newsha Tavakolian, Tyler Hicks, Vincent Musi, David Maisel, and Danny Lyon with Julian Bond."

“For nearly three decades, photographer and visual artist David Maisel — whose gloriously haunting Library of Dust project you might recall from a few years back — has been transforming landscape photography with his stunning aerial images exploring the relationship between Earth and humanity. Now, the best of them are collected in the magnificent monograph Black Maps: American Landscape and he Apocalyptic Sublime — a lavish large-format tome featuring more than 100 of Maisel’s surreally entrancing portraits of our worldly reality, at once beautiful and tragic..."

OMCA Artist Talk: The Apocalyptic Sublime with David Maisel. Friday, November 22, 2013, 7–8:30 pm. Join OMCA for a captivating conversation between artist David Maisel and OMCA Senior Curator of Art René de Guzman. OMCA recently acquired two of Maisel’s photographs, The Lake Project 3 and Oblivion 15n.

Mining reviewed by Rob Marks on Art Practical: "David Maisel’s photographs are one thing, and yet another. Although the name of his current Haines Gallery show, Mining, cues viewers into the context of his images, many of them, even under close inspection, remain abstract. Such confusion is consistent with Maisel’s photographic procedures, which omit the physical and visual features that would betray the location or even the idea of a landscape. Maisel’s intention, however, is not so much to hide context as to not disclose it so that the images occupy an unstable position between documentation and abstraction."

David Maisel – Mining at Haines Gallery, San Francisco. Opening reception with artist: First Thursday, September 5, 2013, 5:30pm – 7:30pm. For his fifth exhibition with Haines Gallery, Maisel presents Mining – a selection of photographs from The Mining Project and American Mine, series never before seen at the gallery. These works consider the relationship between nature and humanity, and encompass both stark documentary and tragic metaphor. With The Mining Project, Maisel negotiated a deliberate shift from black-and-white images to color, and started to produce large-scale photographs that make greater use of abstraction. Curator Natasha Egan suggests, “[h]is photographs derive their effectiveness through formal choices involving color, scale, perspective, and abstraction, which amplify their seductive nature, and conjure the elusive sublime.”

Rick Poynor writes about David Maisel and the Apocalyptic Sublime on the Observatory: "The aerial photographs of David Maisel are often deeply disorientating. His pictures are visions of the Earth as we have never seen it and they are scarcely believable at times in their beauty and terror."

Arid Journal: David Maisel in conversation with Lisa Tamiris Becker.

"Taken together, The Lake Project and Oblivion explore the interrelatedness of the phenomenology, aesthetics, and social/political reality of the Los Angeles metropolis and the arid landscapes and fragile watersheds in which the city is embedded and on which it ultimately depends."

Cabinet Magazine publishes Maisel's American Mine portfolio in Issue 50, Summer 2013, with writer Geoff Manaugh's essay Infinite Exchange. "Vast terraced bowls step down—and down and, impossibly, further down—tracking dead faults and mineralization fronts on a scale only made clear when we notice 16-ton trucks like specks of dust on canyon walls. Discolored oceans of chemical runoff wash across vehicle tracks with acid tides. Retaining walls and stabilized slopes loom over assembled superscapes of mine detritus, abandoned shells of industrial insects dwarfed by the world they’ve helped create...These mines grow in great metastasizing voids, like storm fronts of negative space exploding with slow thunder into the planet."

Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime is reviewed in The New York Times by Dana Jennings. "This eye-opening survey of the photographer David Maisel's major aerial projects reveals the terrible beauty of the industrial age. Photo after photo unveils the common, human-created cancers forced upon on our landscapes: open-pit mines, hazardous waste sites, nerve-gas depots, the desolation of Los Angeles. These photos tell tales the way scars tell the story of a body — and who knew that poisons could be so seductively iridescent? Black Maps, rather than focusing on the death of beauty, wrestles with the beauty of death."

Maisel is interviewed on Tyler Green's Modern Art Notes podcast about his recent monograph publication Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime.

"Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime" is the first in-depth survey of the major aerial projects by David Maisel, whose images of radically altered terrain have transformed the practice of contemporary landscape photography. In more than 100 photographs that span Maisel’s career, Black Maps presents a hallucinatory worldview encompassing both stark documentary and tragic metaphor, and exploring the relationship between nature and humanity today.

Domus review by Davide Stimilli of David Maisel / Black Maps at the CU Boulder Art Museum. “The prospect the viewer is asked to share, and the proper standard by which to measure Maisel's vision...is no longer the all-too-human bird's-eye view, but the god's-eye view of Wallace Stevens’ necessary angel, who has inspired Maisel's work from its inception, as we learn from the magnificent volume that has been released in conjunction with the exhibition."

Paul Moakley, “Uncharted Territories: Black Maps by David Maisel.” March 27, 2013. “The original impetus for the work was informed by looking really closely at 19th-century exploratory photography,” explains Maisel, “and then, an arc through the New Topographics work of the 70s.” He cites the work of iconic black-and-white image makers like Lewis Baltz and Robert Adams — photographers who focused on man-altered landscapes — but felt inspired to “push it further.”

Nazraeli Press has released a new, limited edition version of Maisel's History's Shadow monograph. Limited to an edition of twenty five, each book comes with a signed and numbered limited edition print in a specially designed clamshell box.