Image: Mary Mattingly (American, b. 1978), ‘A Silence Contained for Years,’ 2018. Inkjet print. Milwaukee Art Museum, Purchase, with funds from the Photography Council, M2024.57
The Milwaukee Art Museum will present ‘Beneath the Surface: Mining and American Photography’ from October 23, 2026 through January 18, 2027 in the Herzfeld Center for Photography and Media Arts. The exhibition is included with Museum admission and is free for Members (source: the Museum’s own exhibition page).
The exhibition was organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where it has been on view since May 23, 2026 and closes on August 23, 2026 in Gallery M74 of the West Building. Milwaukee is the second stop on a three-city tour; the show afterwards travels to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, February 14–May 9, 2027 (source: National Gallery of Art). The Milwaukee Art Museum describes the project as organized by the National Gallery in collaboration with itself and the Amon Carter.
The exhibition is co-curated by Diane Waggoner, acting head and curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, and Kristen Gaylord, Herzfeld Curator of Photography and Media Arts at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Both museums state the same curatorial credit.
According to the National Gallery, the exhibition gathers roughly 150 photographs and covers 185 years of picture-making in the United States; the Milwaukee Art Museum’s own text gives the span as 180 years. Its subject is resource extraction — coal and metal mining, oil drilling and fracking — an industry that mostly takes place underground or in remote country, and the methods photographers have devised to depict it, from nineteenth-century survey and documentary work through to recent contemporary art.
The Milwaukee presentation emphasises three threads running through the material: landscapes remade by extraction, the communities that live with its consequences, and the workers and systems that keep it running. The Museum also draws attention to photography’s own dependence on mined matter, from the light-sensitive silver of historical processes to the copper in the batteries of today’s digital cameras.
Artists in the selections published by the two museums include Carleton E. Watkins, William Herman Rau, Lewis Wickes Hine, Florence Kemmler, Fons Ianelli, Jack Delano, Arthur Rothstein, Gordon Parks, Edward Weston, Richard Avedon, Milton Rogovin, Stephen Shore, Zig Jackson, Mitch Epstein, David Maisel, Cara Romero, Will Wilson, Lucas Foglia and Mary Mattingly, together with an unattributed daguerreotype portrait of a California gold miner of about 1855.
In Milwaukee the exhibition has a leadership sponsorship given in memory of Christina L. Balk, and contributing sponsors include the Museum’s Photography Council; exhibitions in the Herzfeld Center are sponsored by the Herzfeld Foundation. At the National Gallery, major support came from the Center for Contemporary Documentation, with leadership support from the Trellis Charitable Fund and additional support from Nion McEvoy and Leslie Berriman.
The photograph issued with the Milwaukee announcement is Mary Mattingly’s inkjet print ‘A Silence Contained for Years’ (2018), bought by the Museum with funds from its Photography Council and catalogued as M2024.57; the collection record gives the sheet as 29 3/4 by 29 3/4 inches. The Mattingly work named on the Museum’s published list of selected exhibition artworks is a different piece, ‘Cobalt Map’ (2016).
