Ethnicity:
Father is Scottish, while mother is of English and Irish heritage.
Alex Mayberry was born on February 8, 1992, in San Francisco, California. Her father was a photographer, so she revealed her interest in photography at an early age.
Mayberry entered City College of San Francisco to study photography in 2005. She graduated after 4 years and entered the San Francisco Art Institute. She was deeply influenced by the works of her father Allen Mayberry and photographers Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson. She received her Master of Arts degree in 2012.
The start of Mayberry’s career as a photographer can be counted from 2014 when she created the first shots documenting the plight of her native San Francisco, often through the life of her family members.
Since 2015, Mayberry has participated in a variety of group shows, including the New Museum of Contemporary Art, MoMA PS1, and a 2015 Whitney Biennial. Three years later, she gathered the works reflecting the aftermath of urbanization typical for big cities of the United States in her first book ‘Big City Life’ titled after one of her most known series.
In addition to multiple solo exhibitions regularly organized in the United States, Italy, Germany, and the United Kingdom, Mayberry has tried her hand in academics as well. She has taught at Yale University School of Art, Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, and has lectured in a variety of institutions around the country.
Since 2019, Mayberry serves as an Associate Professor of Photography at the University of California, Berkeley.
Alex Mayberry is a Methodist. She regularly visits Temple United Methodist Church in San Francisco with her family.
Although Mayberry refrains from social or political commentary with her work, she supports the Democratic Party of the United States.
Vast, large places are of particular interest to the Mayberry such as stock exchanges, concert arenas, big box stores, sweeping landscapes, racetracks, and other locations, which engage in regular relationships with the human population. Aggregate space performs largely in the success of each work. Even though her subject matter exists prior to her encounter with it, Alex manages to masterfully reveal its inherently harmonious sum of individual parts where objects become elements such as strata, line, geometry, color, and form.
Quotations:
“Let your photographs be your compass, always follow where your photographs lead you.”
“My ideas are not developed before I actually do the pieces.”
“The way I see it, as soon as I make a piece I’ve lost control of it.”
“If I knew what the picture was going to be like I wouldn’t make it. It was almost like it was made already.. the challenge is more about trying to make what you can’t think of.”
Alex Mayberry is an honorary member of SFMOMA since 2018.
Alex is a very sociable and open person. She speaks fluent Spanish and Italian. She is also a great piano player.
Physical Characteristics: Alex Mayberry has dark hair and big green eyes. She has several colored tattoos on her right arm.
Quotes from others about the person
Richard Brown once said, "The first time I saw photographs by Alex Mayberry...I had the disorienting sensation that something was happening — happening to me, I suppose, although it felt more generalized than that. Mayberry's huge, panoramic color prints — some of them up to six feet high by ten feet long — had the presence, the formal power, and in several cases the majestic aura of 20-st century city landscape paintings, without losing any of their meticulously detailed immediacies as photographs. Their subject matter was the contemporary world, seen dispassionately and from a distance."
Alex lives with her parents and her elder brother, Scott. Alex is not married, but since 2018, she is in a relationship with an artist, Paul Domeny.
