INFO

GALLERY REPRESENTATION

NEW YORK
Edwynn Houk Gallery
745 Fifth Avenue Fourth Floor
New York, NY 10151
T: 212.750.7070
alexis@houkgallery.com

SAN FRANCISCO
Haines Gallery
First Floor, 2 Marina Blvd Building C
San Francisco, CA 94123
T: 415.397.8114
alexandra@hainesgallery.com

DENVER
Robischon Gallery
1740 Wazee St
Denver CO 80202
T: 303.298.7788‬
jennifer@robischongallery.com

MADRID
Ivory Press
C/Comandante Zorita 48
28020 Madrid, SPAIN
T: +3.491.449.0961
vmaasburg@ivorypress.com

DAVID MAISEL STUDIO

General Inquiries:
studio@davidmaisel.com

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ASSIGNMENTS / COMMISSIONS

Institute for Artist Management
Matt Shonfeld
Executive Director / London
T: +44 1225 777 777
matt@instituteartist.com

BIO

David Maisel (b. 1961, New York) is an artist whose work spans photography, painting, and video. He is the recipient of Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and has been an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, among other awards and honors. His work is represented in more than fifty public collections internationally and has been the subject of seven monographs.

Working with changes to the Earth as a constant subject for nearly four decades, with a global purview but a particular focus on the American west, Maisel is acutely aware that “we are on a perilous trajectory with regards to the environment and climate change.” His in-depth photographic series and video installations address the psychological and environmental impact of landscapes radically transformed by mineral extraction, natural resource reclamation, desertification, and military weapons testing. His large-scaled abstract paintings respond to the accelerating intensity of catastrophic climate change events such as wildfire and flood.

In this moment of planetary reckoning with the environmental consequences of human activity, Maisel’s photographs and paintings are both prescient and timely. Yet they are also strangely seductive, and Maisel does not shy away from the tension of this duality between acts of destruction and the formation of an aesthetic response. His images describe a world wholly remade by human activity; although visually resplendent, they are also spatially ambiguous and destabilizing, with aspects of beauty, fascination, and horror in equal measure.

An active lecturer, Maisel has spoken on his work at Harvard University’s Center for the Environment, the National Gallery of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the de Young Museum, the Pomona College Museum of Art, Middlebury College, Bates College, and, at in-person and online lectures and conversations sponsored by the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco and the National Museum of Natural History, among others. He has been a Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker at the School of Art and Design, University of Michigan, and has participated in symposia on his work organized by the New York Institute for the Humanities and Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Maisel holds a BA from Princeton University and an MFA from California College of the Arts, in addition to study at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He resides in San Francisco, CA.

Download Artist Statement (pdf) | Download CV (pdf) | Download Quotes (pdf)

(c) Lynn Fontana

MAJOR PROJECTS

For more than thirty-five years, David Maisel has made aerial photographs of environmentally impacted terrain, in a multi-chaptered endeavor titled Black Maps. Maisel brings his focus to zones where human intervention has radically changed the land – natural resource extraction, the clear cutting of forests, massive water reclamation projects in the desert, and military weapons testing sites. His otherworldly images consider the aesthetics and politics of such domains in equal measure; they are as seductively beautiful as they are terrifying. Maisel’s photographs eloquently describe hidden realms that have been sacrificed to enable our contemporary existence.

Several of Maisel’s aerial photography projects consider fragile desert environments transformed by human activity. The Lake Project depicts the remnants of Owens Lake, which was drained and diverted into the California Aqueduct to bring water to the fledgling desert city of Los Angeles beginning in 1913, becoming an epic environmental disaster in the process. Proving Ground utilizes photography and time-based media to investigate Dugway Proving Ground, a classified military installation in the Utah desert devoted to the development and testing of chemical and biological weapons and defense systems. With support from a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts, Maisel created Desolation Desert, a body of work documenting the damage wrought by lithium and copper mining in Chile’s environmentally sensitive Atacama Desert. Most recently, Maisel returned to the Great Salt Lake, an area he has worked in for decades, to chart the severe drought conditions caused by regional climate change and industrial development in a new series called Spiraling.

In projects such as Library of Dust and History’s Shadow, Maisel investigates institutional archives, showing the power of objects to convey meaning over time. Library of Dust depicts one hundred copper canisters from the Oregon State Hospital, each containing the cremated remains of a psychiatric patient unclaimed after death. In History’s Shadow, Maisel uses conservation x-rays depicting sculpture, painting, and artifacts from antiquity as source material in the creation of new photographic artworks. Through re-photography of these scientific records from the Getty Museum and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, Maisel forms mysterious, oracular images that reanimate these remnants from the past.

AWARDS, HONORS, SYMPOSIA

Maisel is the recipient of a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts; a 2011 Investing in Artists Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation; a 2008 Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts; a 2007 Scholar in Residence at the Getty Research Institute; a 1990 Individual Artists Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts; and a 1984 Francis LeMoyne Page Award in the Visual Arts from Princeton University. Maisel was named to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts 100 in 2015, and was a finalist for the 2008 Prix Pictet Award in Photography and the 2008 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Maisel served as a Trustee of the Headlands Center for the Arts from 2011 to 2019, and serves on the California College of the Arts President’s Alumni Council.

Maisel’s Library Of Dust was the subject of a 2009 symposium organized by Lawrence Weschler and the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU; speakers included Karen Lang, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Jonathan Lethem, Geoff Manaugh, Michael Roth, Luc Sante, Lawrence Weschler, and others. Maisel’s Black Maps was the subject of a 2016 symposium organized by Neil Brenner and Harvard University Graduate School of Design; speakers included Pierre Bélanger, Rosetta Sarah Elkin, Sharon Harper, and Neil Brenner.

SOLO AND GROUP EXHIBITIONS

Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime was a solo exhibition of Maisel’s landscape work that traveled from 2013-2015; it originated at the CU Boulder Art Museum and traveled to the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and the University of New Mexico Art Museum, among other venues.

Maisel’s work has been exhibited internationally, including the following major group exhibitions, among others: Landmark: The Fields of Photography (Somerset House, London); New Territory: Landscape Photography Today (Denver Art Museum, Denver CO); Surveying the Terrain, (Raleigh Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh NC); History Recast: Contemporary Photography of Classical Sculpture (American Academy, Rome); Memory Theater (Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY); Infinite Balance: Artists and the Environment (Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego CA); Imagination Earth (Seoul Arts Center); Imaging a Shattering Earth: Contemporary Photography and the Environmental Debate (Museum Of Contemporary Art, Toronto, and the National Gallery of Art, Ottawa); Dark Matters: Artists See the Impossible (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco CA); and Ecotopia; the Photography Triennial (International Center of Photography, New York NY). In addition, Maisel has been featured in exhibitions at the Victoria & Albert Museum (London), the Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT), and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles CA), among many other venues.

MONOGRAPH PUBLICATIONS

Maisel’s photographs have been the subject of seven monographs: Proving Ground (Radius, 2020); Mount St Helens: Afterlife (Ivorypress, 2017); Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime (Steidl, 2013); History’s Shadow (Nazraeli, 2011); Library of Dust (Chronicle, 2008); Cascade Effect (Nazraeli, 2008); Oblivion (Nazraeli, 2006); and The Lake Project (Nazraeli, 2004).