The Roof is on Fire: Artists Responding to Climate Change
Binh Danh, David Maisel, and Aspen Mays
Thursday, September 23, 2021
6:00 - 7:30 PM PDT
On Thursday, September 23rd from 6:00 - 7:30 PM PDT, SF Camerawork hosted our panel talk Artists Responding to Climate Change as part of our auction programming. The work of several participating auction artists related our auction theme “The Roof Is on Fire” to the crisis of climate change and global warming. In a panel discussion, Binh Danh, David Maisel, and Aspen Mays, shared the ecological aspects of their work and engaged in dialogue about the often devastating impact of the Anthropocene era on the planet's natural life. With ever more pervasive floods and fires, along with the COVID pandemic, among the signposts of a sixth mass extinction, how can we creatively cope with the threat of biological annihilation?
ABOUT BINH DANH
Binh Danh received his BFA in photography from San Jose State University, and his MFA from Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA. He has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at institutions including Louisiana State Museum, New Orleans (2018); Phillips Museum of Art at Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA (2018); Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY (2016); and Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, VA (2015).
Danh’s work is held in a number of permanent institutional collections, including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and De Young Museum, San Francisco; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Philadelphia Museum of Art; George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; and San Jose Museum of Art, CA.
He was included in the 18th Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2012) and has completed recent residencies at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts, Hailey, ID (2013); Lesley University, Cambridge, MA (2018), and with Haines Gallery in Nevada City, CA (2019).
ABOUT DAVID MAISEL
David Maisel’s photographs, multi-media projects, and public installations have recently been exhibited at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, CA; San Jose Museum of Art, CA; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA; Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA; Denver Art Museum, CO; Nevada Art Museum, Reno, NV; Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China; ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea; and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. His works are included in many public collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, MN; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. Maisel was a scholar in residence at the Getty Research Institute, and artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Marin, CA. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018, as well as an Individual Artist’s grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (1990) and Investing in Artists grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation, (2011). His work has been the subject of seven monographs: The Lake Project (Nazraeli Press, 2004), Oblivion (Nazraeli Press, 2006), Library of Dust (Chronicle Books, 2008), History’s Shadow (Nazraeli Press, 2011), Black Maps (Steidl, 2013), Mount St. Helens: Afterlife (Ivorypress, 2018), and Proving Ground (Radius Books and the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art/Utah State University, 2020).
ABOUT ASPEN MAYS
Aspen Mays was raised in Charleston, SC. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in anthropology and Spanish from University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. She is currently an associate professor and chair of undergraduate photography at California College of the Arts. She is represented by Higher Pictures Generation in New York, and her recent honors include a 2021 Purchase Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Mays was also a Fulbright Scholar in Santiago, Chile, where she spent time with astrophysicists using the world’s most advanced telescopes to look at the sky, an experience that has made a lasting impact on her work.
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