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“Brackish Water Los Angeles” at CSU Dominguez Hills University Art Gallery

August 12 - December 14, 2024. Brackish Water Los Angeles examines the ecosystems, infrastructures, and politics surrounding brackish water, which refers to the space where salt and fresh waters meet. The project considers the larger implications of in-betweenness, including issues of access, inclusion, ecological racism, and cultural/class system interchanges along Los Angeles’ waterways.
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“Out of Site: Survey Science and the Hidden West” at Autry Museum of the American West

May 18, 2024 – January 5, 2025. The Western landscape is a place where the transformation of physical space involves both visualization and manipulation, where the connections between what can be physically seen and how it is visually represented are not always clear; technologies originally designed to render places visible often became instruments of invisibility and surveillance, severing western lands from the populations that depend on them.
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“David Maisel: Un/Earthed” at Haines Gallery

November 3, 2023 - January 6, 2024. Haines Gallery proudly presents David Maisel: Un/Earthed, our eighth solo exhibition with the Bay Area artist. For over thirty years, Maisel has created powerful photographs of sites transformed by human intervention. At once mesmerizing and disquieting, his thoughtfully composed aerial images consider the aesthetics, politics, and environmental impact of these radically altered landscapes.
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“David Maisel: The Expanded Field” at Edwynn Houk Gallery

October 14 – November 20, 2021. Edwynn Houk Gallery is pleased to announce David Maisel’s inaugural exhibition, "The Expanded Field". Over the course of the past three decades, Maisel has concentrated his artist practice on creating large scale aerial photographs depicting sites of environmental transformation throughout the American West, including open pit mining, water reclamation, urban sprawl, and zones of desertification. His most recent series, "Desolation Desert", has taken him to the copper and lithium mines of Chile’s Atacama Desert.
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“Apocalyptic / Sublime” at Haines Gallery

March, 2021. Haines Gallery Proudly presents "Apocalyptic / Sublime", an exhibition of works by David Maisel. In his carefully constructed, reality-based photographs, David Maisel stages careful investigations that use unexpected perspectives to make the invisible visible — in landscapes transformed by industrialization or urbanization, or in our artifacts and memories of the past.
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© David Maisel, All Rights Reserved

“The open-air lab testing the world’s deadliest poisons” Interview with BBC

Dugway Proving Ground is one of the most secretive of American military zones, hidden away in Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert. From its inception during World War II to the present day, Dugway’s primary mission has been to develop and test chemical and biological weaponry and defense programs. In Proving Ground, Photographer David Maisel was granted rare access to photograph the terrain, testing facilities, and other aspects of this deliberately obscured region.
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Proving Ground Book Publication

“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
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© David Maisel, All Rights Reserved

Edwynn Houk Gallery announces representation of David Maisel

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.
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© David Maisel, All Rights Reserved

“A Cure for Everything” at Haines Gallery

January 5 – March 2, 2019. Haines Gallery is pleased to present A Cure for Everything, a group exhibition bringing together works by nine artists working in photography, print, and video. Employing alternative or experimental techniques, each of the artists in the show push the boundaries and possibilities of how we picture the landscape.
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Guggenheim Fellowship 2018

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.
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Broadway Billboard at Socrates Sculpture Park

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.
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SF Weekly

KYDOIMOS: The Din of Battle, a hypnotic and beautifully surreal 30-minute film, synchronizes aerial photographs of a U.S. military testing ground in Utah in "Proving Ground". Composer Chris Kallmyer created the music that accompanies David Maisel’s tsunami of curated images — all 50,000 of them, racing across the screen like microbiology slides or spotlight grids where military personnel detonate biological and chemical agents on the earth below.
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National Gallery Interview

David Maisel was interviewed on August 24, 2015, in conjunction with the exhibition "The Memory of Time: Contemporary Photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Acquired with the Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund" (May 3-September 13, 2015). The exhibition featured photographs from Maisel's series "History's Shadow," a project he began while a scholar in residence at the Getty Research Institute.
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© David Maisel, All Rights Reserved

Black Maps Book Signing at LA Art Book Fair

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.
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Museum as Muse in American Art: A Symposium

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.
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David Maisel: Ruscha, the American West, and Me

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.
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David Maisel in conversation with curator William A. Ewing at “Photo London”

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."
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“The Fall” at Haines Gallery

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.
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David Maisel

“History’s Shadow” Exhibition at Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York

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.”
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© David Maisel, All Rights Reserved

“Toledo Contemporanea” Exhibition and Book Publication

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.
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National Geographic Photography Symposium, Washington DC

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."
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“Black Maps” monograph named to “Best Books of 2013”

“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..."
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Art Practical: review of Maisel’s “Mining” exhibit

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."
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“David Maisel – Mining” at Haines Gallery, San Francisco

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.”
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Arid Journal: David Maisel interview

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."

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Cabinet Magazine publishes “American Mine”

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."
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“Black Maps” reviewed by The New York Times

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."
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© David Maisel, All Rights Reserved

“Black Maps”: New monograph released from Steidl

"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.
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Domus Review of Maisel’s “Black Maps” Exhibit

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."
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Time Magazine’s LightBox

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.”
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