David Maisel

Summary

David Maisel is a visual artist working in photography, painting and video. Maisel was named a Guggenheim Fellow in the Creative Arts in 2018. He was a Scholar in Residence at the Getty Research Institute in 2007, and an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2008. He served as a Trustee of the Headlands Center for the Arts from 2011 through 2019. In 2015, Maisel was recognized as one of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts 100, a group honored for their commitment to “asking the questions and making the provocations that will shape the future of American culture.” He has been the recipient of an Individual Artist’s Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and an Investing in Artists Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation. Maisel has been shortlisted for the Prix Pictet Award and the Alpert Award in the Visual Arts. He received his BA from Princeton University, and his MFA from California College of the Arts, in addition to study at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Maisel’s work has been the subject of seven monograph publications, including his latest, "Proving Ground," co-published by Radius Books and the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art. His photographs and videos are held in more then fifty public collections, including the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Victoria & Albert Museum, among many others. In his ongoing, multi-chaptered series "Black Maps," Maisel’s aerial photographs of environmentally impacted sites explore the aesthetics and politics of radically human-altered environments, open pit mines, clear-cut forests, and zones of water reclamation, framing the issues of contemporary landscape with equal measures of documentation and metaphor. Curator Robert Sobieszek states, “Maisel has succeeded in mapping the fictive terrains of the unconscious, of nightmares and hallucinations. He has also used the camera’s objectifying optics to form cartographies of the irrational and the perverse, the preconscious and the primordial, the apocalyptic.”