Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Photography, photograms, printmaking, installation
Website: aspenmays.com
Aspen Mays was born in 1980 in Asheville, North Carolina, and raised in Charleston, South Carolina. She earned a BA in Anthropology and Spanish from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2002) and an MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2009). She lives and works in Oakland, California.
Mays joined the faculty of California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2015, where she serves as Associate Professor and Chair of Undergraduate Photography, Printmedia, and Painting and Drawing. Her formative experiences include a 2006 Rotary Fellowship that took her to Cape Town, South Africa, where she studied photography while volunteering at a clinic for beadworking artisans living with HIV, and a 2009–2010 Fulbright Scholarship to Santiago, Chile, where she embedded with astrophysicists working with some of the world’s most advanced telescopes. That encounter with observational science fundamentally shaped her artistic inquiry. In 2021 she received a Purchase Prize Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which placed her work California Dreaming (1) (2018) in the permanent collection of SFMOMA. From 2022 to 2024 she served as an artist researcher with Unseen California, a project examining California’s complex histories through creative ecology and visual documentation.
Her work has been written about in Artforum, Art Papers, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, and she has been described as a “postmodern mystic” for the way she combines rigorous conceptual structures with sensory, embodied ways of making.
Mays works across photography, photograms, printmaking, and mixed media, consistently questioning what knowledge can be produced through systematic looking and cataloguing. Her practice draws on the languages of both observational science and intimate material culture — she has pinpricked vintage bandannas by touch in a dark room, documented every leaf on a single tree with over 900 individual photographs, collected pyrite sun specimens from Illinois coal mines to set beside archival images of the sun, and made large-scale photograms using architectural templates inherited from her family. Rather than reaching for technological solutions, she finds new possibilities in commonplace objects and overlooked archives, asking how organizing individual components changes our perception of the whole.
Recurring themes include light, gravity, astronomical phenomena, and the relationship between scientific investigation and photographic evidence. Her images often carry a hand-made quality — unique silver gelatin prints, fabric dyes, cyanotypes, indigo-dyed photograms — even when working at monumental scale. The work is at once rigorous and lyrical, drawing connections between natural patterns and human production, between cosmic observation and the tactile, domestic object.
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