Joseph Maida
Maida’s pivotal relationship with his paternal Aunt and Uncle, a nisei Japanese American from Hawaiʻi and an Italian immigrant from Southern Italy, served as his personal point of entry into engaging with Ansel Adams’ Manzanar archive in the wake of Trump’s Presidency and a resurgence in ethnically targeted legislation mirroring the first half of the 20th century.
JOSEPH MAIDA is an artist, writer, and educator, who chairs the BFA Photography and Video Department at New York’s School of Visual Arts. Maida has exhibited his work extensively in New York at the International Center for Photography (ICP); Yancey Richardson Gallery; Art in General; Artists Space; the Queens Museum; and the Bronx Museum and internationally at Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam; the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid; the Kunsthalle Wien; the Witte de With, Rotterdam; C/O Berlin; the Photographers’ Gallery, London; the Nikon Salons, Tokyo and Osaka; and 403 International Art Center, Wuhan, among others. Maida’s commissioned work has appeared in publications including The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, W, Wallpaper*, and Vice, and Maida’s monographs New Natives and Born Free and Equal were published by L’Artiere (Bologna, Italy) in 2015 and CONVOKE (New York, NY) in 2018 respectively. Maida’s perspective uniquely navigates the photographic ideologies of the American Northeast, West Coast Conceptualism, the Pictures Generation, and the Düsseldorf School. After earning his BA summa cum laude in architecture and art history from Columbia University, Maida received his MFA at Yale with teachers including Philip-Lorca di Corcia, Gregory Crewdson, Catherine Opie, and Laurie Simmon followed by a mentorship with with Thomas Struth before traveling to Japan for a year with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Bunkachō (文化庁), where his work was supported by Japanese photographer, Eikoh Hosoe.