DAVID MAISEL

David Maisel is an artist working in photography and video. Among his chief concerns are 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. For over thirty years, Maisel has produced aerial photographs of compromised landscapes in a multi-chaptered series titled Black Maps, revealing the physical impact of activities such as mining, logging, urban sprawl, and military testing. These aerial views of human intervention on the landscape become compelling painterly abstractions with a strange beauty born of environmental degradation. Maisel is the recipient of a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts as well as many other awards and honors. His 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).

 
 

A Conversation with David Maisel and Dr. Bonnie Roos facilitated by Alex Gregory, AMoA Curator of Art

 
 

A Virtual Tour of the David Maisel Installation at AMoA

 
 
David Maisel, Terminal Mirage 5, 2003; Archival pigment print, 48x48 in; © David Maisel: Image courtesy of the artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA, and Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York, NY.

David Maisel, Terminal Mirage 5, 2003; Archival pigment print, 48x48 in; © David Maisel: Image courtesy of the artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA, and Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York, NY.

David Maisel, The Mining Project Butte MT 9, 1989; Archival pigment print, 48x48 in; © David Maisel: Image courtesy of the artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA, and Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York, NY.

David Maisel, The Mining Project Butte MT 9, 1989; Archival pigment print, 48x48 in; © David Maisel: Image courtesy of the artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA, and Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York, NY.

David Maisel, The Lake Project 1, 2001; Archival pigment print, 48x48 in. © David Maisel: Image courtesy of the artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA, and Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York, NY.

David Maisel, The Lake Project 1, 2001; Archival pigment print, 48x48 in. © David Maisel: Image courtesy of the artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA, and Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York, NY.