David Maisel was born in New York City in 1961. He received his BA from Princeton University, and his MFA from California College of the Arts, in addition to study at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He has been the recipient of an Individual Artist’s Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 2007, and a Visiting Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2008. He was recently shortlisted for the first Prix Pictet Award in Photography, and has been nominated for the 2009 Alpert Award in the Visual Arts. Maisel lives and works in the San Francisco area, where he has been based since 1993.

For more than twenty years, David Maisel has chronicled the tensions between nature and culture in his large-scaled photographs of environmentally impacted landscapes. In the multi-chaptered series Black Maps, his images show the physical impact on the land from efforts such as mining, logging, water reclamation, and military testing. Maisel frequently works from an aerial perspective, thereby permitting images and photographic evidence that would be otherwise unattainable.

In Maisel’s recent project, Library of Dust, he continues to investigate a zone bordered by aesthetics and ethics. The series depicts individual copper canisters, each containing the cremated remains of patients from a state-run psychiatric hospital, whose bodies have been unclaimed by their families. The canisters are now blooming with colorful secondary minerals as the copper undergoes physical and chemical transformations.

Maisel’s photographs, multi-media projects, and public installations have been exhibited internationally, and are included in many permanent collections, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. His work has been the subject of four monographs: The Lake Project (Nazraeli Press, 2004); Oblivion (Nazraeli Press, 2006); Cascade Effect (Nazraeli Press, Fall 2008); and Library of Dust (Chronicle Books, Fall 2008).

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For print sales, please contact one of the following galleries:

New York:
Von Lintel Gallery
http://www.vonlintel.com

San Francisco:
Haines Gallery
http://www.hainesgallery.com

Boston:
Miller Block Gallery
http://www.millerblockgallery.com