Image: Academy Art Museum, New York
Academy Art Museum will host an opening reception and artist talk for Lisa Elmaleh’s photography exhibition 'Promised Land' on July 25, with the reception beginning at 5 p.m. in the Selections Gallery and the talk following at 6 p.m. in the Performing Arts room. The museum says the exhibition, which is on view June 9 to August 9, 2026, is built from Elmaleh’s work along the U.S.-Mexico border and her documentation of migration, asylum-seeking and humanitarian support efforts.
According to the museum’s exhibition page, 'Promised Land/Tierra Prometida' is a photographic body of work inspired by and positioned against the discourse and visual culture surrounding immigration in mainstream news. The project was catalyzed by rhetoric about the border wall, prompting Elmaleh to travel the border region, make photographs, and volunteer with humanitarian aid organizations. The exhibition takes the borderland itself as both subject and lens, focusing on people seeking asylum in the United States as well as volunteers and groups providing food, shelter and health care, and helping with search and rescue in the desert.
The exhibition is presented in the museum’s Visiting Artist Series and is shown in dialogue with 'Under the Mexican Sky', a pairing the museum describes as a contemporary response that highlights photography’s changing role as expressive communication. The museum’s text frames the juxtaposition as a way to underscore photography’s ability to register political and aesthetic realities at the same time. That institutional context places Elmaleh’s work alongside broader discussions of modern photography in Mexico and the borderlands, which are also reflected in the museum’s related programming this season.
Elmaleh, identified by the museum as a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow for this project, is an American visual artist, educator and documentarian based in Hampshire County, West Virginia. The museum says she works primarily in large-format photography and uses tintype, glass negative and celluloid film. It also notes that she has traveled across the United States since 2007 documenting American landscapes, life and culture. Born in Miami in 1984, Elmaleh earned a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2007 and later completed the Everglades project, which became a 2016 book published by Zatara Press.
The museum’s materials also state that Elmaleh’s work has been exhibited nationwide and recognized by the Arnold Newman Prize, the Aaron Siskind Foundation and the Puffin Foundation. Her photography has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, CNN, The New York Times, National Geographic, Oxford American, Garden & Gun and NPR, among other outlets. Those references situate 'Promised Land' within an established documentary practice while keeping the current exhibition focused on a specific border-region body of work.
The exhibition is accompanied by a one-day 'Wet Plate Collodion' workshop on July 26 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., with space limited and advance registration requested. Academy Art Museum’s season page lists 'Promised Land' as part of its current exhibitions, alongside 'The New Colossus: 2026 Teen Council Exhibition' and 'Under the Mexican Sky: A Revolution in Modern Photography'. The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday with free admission.
