Victoria Sambunaris: Transforming the American Landscape
Essex
Montclair Art Museum
Through large-format photographs, Victoria Sambunaris documents an American terrain shaped by heavy industry, evolving infrastructure, and national expansion.

For more than 25 years, Victoria Sambunaris (b. 1964) has traveled across the United States creating large-format photographs that explore the evolving relationship between the land and human intervention. Rather than presenting an untouched landscape, her work reveals a terrain shaped by industry, infrastructure, and the ambitions that have defined the American experience.
As we reflect on the 250th anniversary of the United States, this exhibition offers a timely opportunity to consider that legacy. The American landscape has long symbolized promise and possibility. Yet Sambunaris’s work invites us to look more closely—at how the land has been used, transformed, too often strained, and, at times, defiled by those ambitions. Her photographs balance a profound sense of beauty with a quiet but powerful questioning of our collective responsibility for the environment.
3 S Mountain Ave, Montclair, NJ 07042, USA
July 21, 2026
to
February 21, 2027