Maxwell Harvey-Sampson is an artist and writer based in Syracuse, NY. Maxwell culturally identifies with the Rust Belt/NYS and has spent significant time in Rochester, Ithaca, Corning, and Syracuse. Fueled by an interest in the queerness of art history, Maxwell’s work is highly referential. Going as far back as the renaissance era, Maxwell’s artistic style pulls from different art periods, queering and recontextualizing formerly cis-hetero narratives. A champion of both digital and analog processes, much of Maxwell’s early work was created in pursuit of a social document. Originally from a small town in Pennsylvania, Maxwell is driven by survival of predominantly xenophobic, heteronormative spaces to celebrate shared queer histories and stories. Maxwell is drawn to difference and sees the photographic exchange as an opportunity to learn and share. Each shoot is about moving through the fluid power dynamics of seeing and being seen with the goal of connection and mutual understanding.
Maxwell’s diaristic writing offers levity, irreverence, and humility to Maxwell’s sometimes fraught psychopathology. Maxwell often writes of the adversities/oddities of piloting a tensile, dualistic, and manic depressive human body that seeks pacification. Maxwell exhibits artwork regularly, here, and also there (Check CV). Maxwell is a 2017 Smithsonian Magazine Finalist and a 2022-2024 Creatives Rebuild New York Fellow. Maxwell holds a BFA from The Rochester Institute of Technology in Photography and an MFA in ImageText from Cornell University. Maxwell is a distance runner and distance cyclist and aspiring triathlete. Maxwell’s Sun, Moon, Rising, and Mercury signs are all in Gemini. Maxwell goes by Maxwell but probably won’t notice you calling Maxwell Max.