CARGO: A Conversation with Richard Misrach, Sarah Meister, and Xin Wang

CARGO: A Conversation with Richard Misrach and Sarah Meister, Moderated by Xin Wang

Pace Live is pleased to present a conversation between photographer Richard Misrach and Sarah Meister, Executive Director of Aperture, on the occasion of Misrach’s latest exhibition, CARGO, at Pace’s New York gallery. For his CARGO series, which he began creating in 2021 amid the pandemic and its attendant lockdowns, Misrach turns his lens to the San Francisco Bay, capturing the towering cargo ships that traverse its waters. His radiant, large-scale photographs in this body of work meditate on the beauty of the bay and also the environmental implications of international commerce. Captured at different times of day from a single location in San Francisco, these images speak to Misrach’s enduring interest in bearing witness to the world around him from a singular vantage point over the course of months or years.

In their conversation—moderated by Pace’s Curatorial Director Xin Wang—Misrach and Meister will discuss CARGO, the artist’s process, and more. Aperture’s new monograph on the artist’s CARGO series, Richard Misrach: Cargo, will be released in May.

Richard Misrach is considered one of the most influential photographers of his generation, instrumental in pioneering the use of color photography and large-scale format in the 1970s. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971 with a BA in Psychology.

For over 50 years, Richard Misrach has photographed the dynamic landscape of the American West through an environmentally aware and politically astute lens. His visually seductive, large-scale color vistas powerfully document the devastating ecological effects of human intervention, industrial development, nuclear testing and petrochemical pollution on the natural world. His best known and ongoing epic series, Desert Cantos, comprises 40 distinct but related groups of pictures that explore the complex conjunction between mankind and nature. Otherworldly images of desert seas, rock formations, and clouds are juxtaposed with unsettling scenes of desert fires, nuclear test sites, and animal burial pits. Recent chapters capture the highly charged political climate following the 2016 US presidential election through photographs of spray-painted graffiti messages scrawled on abandoned buildings and remote rocky outcroppings in desolate areas of the Desert Southwest.

Other bodies of work include Golden Gate, a careful study of times of day, weather, and light around San Francisco’s famed bridge; On the Beach, aerial views of individuals and groups against a backdrop of water and sand; Notations, ravishing landscapes and seascapes in a reversed color spectrum; Destroy This Memory, a haunting document shot with a 4-megapixel pocket camera of graffiti found in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; and Petrochemical America, an in-depth examination of petrochemical pollution along the Mississippi River produced in collaboration with landscape architect Kate Orff.

Since 2021 Sarah Meister has been Executive Director of Aperture, following twenty-five years at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. She is currently curating an exhibition of Carrie Mae Weems’s work that will open in April at the Gallerie d’Italia in Turin, accompanied by a major catalogue in English published by Aperture. At MoMA Sarah organized numerous acclaimed exhibitions and publications, offering new approaches to beloved figures from photography’s history including Diane Arbus, Bill Brandt, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, Frances Benjamin Johnston, and more. She played a central role in expanding the Museum Collection and led several transformative educational initiatives, including the online course “Seeing Through Photographs”.

Xin Wang is a New York-based art historian and Curatorial Director at Pace Gallery. Currently finishing a PhD dissertation on Soviet Hauntology at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, she held curatorial and educational positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Whitney Museum of American Art, and received the Warhol Foundation’s Arts Writers Grant in 2021. Publications such as “Asian Futurism and the Non-Other” have been widely circulated, translated and taught in university curriculums. An appointed faculty at Yale University’s MFA program in Photography since 2021, she served as the curator of the 4th art and technology themed biennial program—titled “To Your Eternity”—at Beijing’s Today Art Museum in fall 2023. Her upcoming publications include “Machine Envy” in the book Machine Decision is Not Final: China and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence (Urbanomic and NYU Shanghai), and “Dance as Socialist World-Building” in Afterall Journal (issue 57).

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