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. A multi-part installation of his work was exhibited in Greater New York 2010 at MoMA PS1, New York. Sherry taught Western Landscape and Large Format photography as a distinguished faculty member at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2018. In the fall of 2020, he joined the Yale MFA Photography program as a Visiting Critic and in 2023 he taught the Graduate Seminar in Photography at UNM Albuquerque.

His work has been exhibited in numerous solo presentations and also included in many group presentations including: “Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene” Nasher Museum of Art, Durham North Carolina (2024) “More  Than: Expanding  Identities of Artists from the American West” Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona (2022), “Ecstatic Land”, Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, Texas (2022), “Ansel Adams In Our Time”, Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Arkansas (2021), ”Color Fields”  MassArt Museum (2015), ”What is a Photograph?”, ICP International Center for Photography, New York (2014), “Western Romance” Fotofocus Biennial, Cincinnati, Ohio (2014), ”Lost Line”,  LACMA Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2013), ”Out of Focus” at Saatchi Gallery, London (2012), “The Anxiety of Photography” Aspen Art Museum (2011).

Sherry's work is in permanent collections at The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, The Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, Wexner Center of the Arts, Columbus, OH, LACMA, Los Angeles, CA, The RISD Museum, Providence, RI, The Saatchi Collection, London, UK, The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, FL.

His work has been featured in many prominent international publications, including Artforum, Aperture, Architectural Digest, Art in America, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and The New York Times, among many others. In September 2014, his work was featured on the cover of The New York Times Magazine. In the spring of 2019, his work was featured on the cover of Aperture Magazine for the Earth issue.

There are five monographs of his work: It’s Time (Damiani, 2010); Quantum Light (Damiani, 2013);  Earth Changes (Mörel, 2015); American Monuments (Radius, 2019) featuring essays by top environmentalists and activists Terry Tempest Williams and Bill McKibben; and his most recent monograph, Pink Genesis (Aperture 2022) featuring an essay by MoMA associate curator of photography Lucy Gallun.


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