Aspen Mays

Courtesy of Higher Pictures.

Since 2015, Aspen Mays has been an associate professor in graduate fine arts and undergraduate photography at California College of the Arts, San Francisco. Her solo exhibitions include Tengallon Sunflower and California Dreaming at Higher Pictures in New York; Every leaf on a tree at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Newspaper Rock at Light Work in Syracuse, New York; and Ships that Pass in the Night at the Center for Ongoing Projects and Research in Columbus, Ohio. Her work is widely collected, including several photographs in the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP), Chicago, collection. Mays’s honors include a Rotary Fellowship in 2006, where she studied photography in Cape Town, South Africa, while volunteering in a clinic for artists living with HIV. Mays was also a Fulbright Scholar in Santiago, Chile, where she spent time with a cohort of astrophysicists who were using the world’s most advanced telescopes to look at the sky. Her collaborative publication with Dan Boardman, Where We've Been, Where We're Going, Why?, was shortlisted for the First Photobook Award by the Aperture Foundation and Paris Photo in 2016. Mays was raised in Charleston, South Carolina. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009 and a BA in anthropology and Spanish from University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 2002.