Join us at Printed Matter Chelsea for a signing of Aspen Mays’ Tengallon Sunflower. Mays will be joined in conversation by Printed Matter Director, Lesley A. Martin to discuss the project.

Tengallon Sunflower brings together three interconnected series of photograms, all made without the use of a camera. The work began as an investigation of personal objects: Mays great grandmother’s bandanna —pale pink, printed with a starburst pattern—and a second vintage bandanna owned by Georgia O’Keefe, dyed indigo and accented with white dots—the kind of ubiquitous textile that seems to have no author or origin. Some scholars have speculated that the warp and weft of textiles were humanity’s first use of a grid. The artist has often returned to this in their work: humble objects that suggest cosmic connections.

Aspen Mays was raised in Charleston, SC. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009 and a BA in Anthropology and Spanish from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 2002. Mays joined the faculty of the California College of the Arts in 2015, where she is an Associate Professor and Chair of Undergraduate Photography.

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 (COR&P) in Columbus, OH. She was included in the national survey of Contemporary Art in the United States, State of the Art, at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. Her work has been written about in Art Forum, Art Papers, the New Yorker and the New York Times. She is represented by Higher Pictures Generation.