David Benjamin Sherry: American Monuments

DAVID BENJAMIN SHERRY: American Monuments is a landscape photography project that captures the spirit and intrinsic value of America’s threatened system of national monuments. In April 2017, an executive order called for the review of the twenty-seven national monuments created since January 1996. In December 2017, the final report called on the president to shrink four national monuments and change the management of six others, recommending that areas in Maine, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans be offered for sale, specifically for oil drilling and coal and uranium mining. American Monuments focuses on the areas under review, with special emphasis on those that have already been decimated. 

Sherry documents these pristine, sacred, and wildly diverse areas using the traditional, historic 8 × 10-inch format. The resulting photographs not only convey the beauty of these important and ecologically diverse sites, but also shed light upon the plight of the perennially exploited landscape of the American West.

David Benjamin Sherry (b. 1981) is an artist working to challenge and reinvigorate the American Western landscape tradition by examining our complex interconnection with the natural world, with an emphasis on queer identity, color and magic. Sherry’s work aims to celebrate the beauty of the American landscape and engage with the fraught history of the West, with its glorified legend of freedom fabricated from stolen lands, which continue to be threatened today. Through the media of analog film photography and painting, his vibrant, large scale and often monochrome works present a new perspective on the subject. Sherry states that “color is a conduit for me to convey and promote an emotional resonance for the landscape, while weaving in my sense of otherness as a queer person, and to symbolically represent those who have been inaccurately left out of the the American West’s mythical narrative of rugged (straight, white, male) individualism.”

Sherry was born in Stony Brook, NY and lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He received his BFA in Photography from RISD in 2003 and his MFA in Photography from Yale University in 2007 where he was awarded the Richard Dixon Welling Prize. In 2010 he received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Visual Arts Grant.

His work has been exhibited in numerous solo presentations and also included in many group presentations, at venues including the Nasher Museum of Art, Tucson Museum of Art, Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, Portland Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, MassArt Museum, ICP, Fotofocus Biennial, LACMA, and Aspen Art Museum. Sherry's work is in permanent collections at The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Nasher Museum of Art, NC; Walker Art Center, MN; Wexner Center of the Arts, OH; LACMA, CA; The RISD Museum, RI; The Saatchi Collection, UK; and Cornell Fine Arts Museum, FL.

David Benjamin Sherry's work is represented by Nicelle Beauchene Gallery (New York), Morán Morán Gallery (Los Angeles) and Huxley Parlour Gallery (London).