Artist Talk Video:
Alison Rossiter in conversation with
Dr. Maya Benton

 

Curator Maya Benton and artist Alison Rossiter participated in an artist talk on Thursday, February 19, 2026, at the gallery in celebration of Rossiter's Semblance. Rossiter and Benton discussed the Semblance exhibition, Rossiter’s experiments with “camera-less photography,” and the creative philosophy behind her process. 

 

Maya Benton is a New York-based museum curator and art historian. From 2008 to 2019, Maya was a curator at the International Center of Photography (ICP), where she established a major archive and organized three of the most widely traveling exhibitions in ICP’s history, including her award-winning exhibition and catalogue, Roman Vishniac Rediscovered and Gillian Laub’s Southern Rites. She has held positions in museums for more than twenty-five years, including the Getty Museum, RISD Museum, Jewish Museum of Florence, Italy, Harvard University Art Museums, and ICP; her catalogues, exhibitions, and research have been translated into more than a dozen languages, garnering international acclaim. Maya has served as curator-in-residence at several international galleries and cultural institutions. Alison Rossiter's work was included in Expired, an exhibition Maya organized for Sara Kay Gallery, exploring the potential of obsolete and expired photographic material.
 
Maya's current projects include a forthcoming book, The Jewishness of Photography, organizing several independent exhibitions, and the establishment of a Jewish Vernacular Photography Archive. For the past several years, she has co-taught a course at Yale University on Jews and Photography. She is a graduate of Brown University, The Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and Harvard University.

 

Works by Alison Rossiter are held in the permanent collections of major public institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; New York Public Library, NY; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA. In 2024, Rossiter’s Gevaert Gevaluxe Velours, exact expiration date unknown, ca. 1930s, processed 2020 (#2) was acquired by Fotomuseum, Antwerp, Belgium, where it played a key role in the exhibition Outdated Paper? Photographic Papers from the Gevaert Archive. In late 2025, (#3) from the same series was acquired by the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, France. Alison Rossiter has mounted solo and two-artist exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Alberta, Canada; Station Kasseler Fotoforum, Kassel, Germany; Columbus College of Art and Design, OH; and Les Rencontres d’Arles Photographie, France, among others. In 2017, Yossi Milo and Radius Books co-published Rossiter’s first monograph, Expired Paper, followed by Compendium 1898-1919 in 2020 with the New York Public Library, following Rossiter’s inclusion in Anna Atkins Refracted: Contemporary Works. Rossiter lives and works in New York.

Took place on Thursday, February 19