Victoria Sambunaris: Transformation of a Landscape

Her second monograph with Radius, Victoria Sambunaris: Transformation of a Landscape shares the nuance and majesty of the artist’s practice in a large-scale book format.

Based in New York, Victoria Sambunaris structures her life around a photographic journey traversing the American landscape for several months per year. Equipped with a 5×7-inch field camera, a video camera, and research material, she crosses the country alone tenting on top of her car. Her project-based photographs document the continuing transformation of the American landscape with specific attention given to expanding political, technological, and industrial interventions.

Part of her ongoing, twenty-four-year series “Taxonomy of a Landscape,” this book encompasses the past decade of work, including collected ephemera that form the essential and incidental elements of her practice as a photographer and researcher. Also featured are archival documentation of experiences and observations on the road, such as snapshots, maps, road logs, journals, geology and history books, mineral specimens, and artifacts.

The work of Victoria Sambunaris is held in numerous public collections across the United States, including the Denver Art Museum (CO), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), Art Institute of Chicago (IL), International Center of Photography (NY), Center for Creative Photography (AZ), Buffalo AKG Museum (NY), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA), Museum of Modern Art (NY), National Museum of Women in the Arts (DC), Brigham Young University Museum of Art (UT), Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VA), Museum of Fine Arts Houston (TX), Nelson-Atkins Museum (MO), and National Gallery of Art (DC).

Victoria Sambunaris (b. 1964, Lancaster, PA) creates large-scale photographs that document the intersection of the natural and the manmade within the American landscape. She received her BFA from George Washington University (1986) and MFA from Yale University (1999) and has held teaching positions at Yale in the Schools of Art and Architecture. Her work has been widely exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the U.S. and abroad. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2021), Julius Shulman Excellence in Photography Award (2020), Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship (2010), and Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2010). Her work is held in numerous collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Buffalo AKG Museum, NY; Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, NM; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; and National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. In 2019, Sambunaris was commisioned by Dia Art Foundation to photograph Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Sun Tunnels by Nancy Holt. Her first monograph, Taxonomy of a Landscape, was published by Radius Books in 2013. She is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery in NY.

Angie Keefer was born in 1977 in Alabama, USA, and currently lives and works in upstate New York. She graduated from Yale University, where she studied sculpture. As an artist, writer, teacher, and publisher, she produces objects, images, texts, talks, performances, and public programs, often in collaboration with other artists and institutions. Recent exhibitions of her work include FIRST CLASS, SECOND THOUGHTS, INTERMINABLE SWELL at Plug In ICA, Winnipeg (2017); Greater New York at MoMA PS1, New York (2015-16); Area Variance at Kunstverein Munich (2015); Whitney Biennial at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2014); Why bother? at Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp (2013-14); and Angie Keefer at Yale Union, Portland (2013). Keefer’s talks, public events, and various collaborations with other artists have also been produced at Artists Space, New York (2015); Liverpool Biennial, UK (2014); and the São Paulo Biennial, Brazil (2012), among others.

Hernan Diaz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of two novels translated into thirty-five languages. He is the recipient of the John Updike award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, given to “a writer whose contributions to American literature have demonstrated consistent excellence.”

His first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and it was the winner of the Saroyan International Prize, the Cabell Award, the Prix Page America, and the New American Voices Award, among other distinctions. It was also a Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year and one of Lit Hub’s 20 Best Novels of the Decade. 

Trust, his second novel, received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a New York Times Bestseller, the winner of the Kirkus Prize, and longlisted for the Booker Prize, among other nominations. It was listed as a best book of the year by over thirty publications and named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, and Time magazine, and it was one of The New Yorker’s 12 Essential Reads of the Year. One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2022, Trust is currently  being developed as a limited series for HBO.

He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center. 

Dionne Lee works in photography, collage, and video to explore power, survival, and personal history in relation to the American landscape.

She received her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2017. She has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Yancey Richardson, and Aperture Foundation in New York City; New Orleans Museum of Art; and the San Francisco Arts Commission, among others. Lee was a 2022 Artist-in-Residence at The Chinati Foundation and Unseen California. 

Lee is an Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University and lives on the unceded territories of the Shawnee, Potawatomi, Delaware, Miami, Peoria, Seneca, Wyandotte, Ojibwe and Cherokee peoples. 

Victoria Sambunaris (b. 1964, Lancaster, PA) creates large-scale photographs that document the intersection of the natural and the manmade within the American landscape. She received her BFA from George Washington University (1986) and MFA from Yale University (1999) and has held teaching positions at Yale in the Schools of Art and Architecture. Her work has been widely exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the U.S. and abroad. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2021), Julius Shulman Excellence in Photography Award (2020), Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship (2010), and Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2010). Her work is held in numerous collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Buffalo AKG Museum, NY; Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, NM; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; and National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. In 2019, Sambunaris was commisioned by Dia Art Foundation to photograph Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Sun Tunnels by Nancy Holt. Her first monograph, Taxonomy of a Landscape, was published by Radius Books in 2013. She is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery in NY.