Aspen Mays

Aspen Mays (born 1980) is an American artist.

Aspen Mays was born in Asheville, North Carolina, and raised in Charleston, South Carolina.

Mays received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

She also studied photography in Cape Town, South Africa while volunteering in a clinic for bead working artisans living with HIV.

Mays's solo exhibitions include Every leaf on a tree at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; From the Offices of Scientists at the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Concentrate and Ask Again at Golden Gallery, Chicago.

In 2006, she was awarded a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship for study in Cape Town, South Africa.

More recently, honors include a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Chile, Santiago.

She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

The Atlanta-based Art Papers describes her work as standing "in Deft opposition to the technology we have come to rely on for answers, putting faith not in complex databases and rapidly evolving technology, but rather in the ability of everyday objects and materials to spark our imagination."

In doing so, she "re-imagines the world around us, finding new possibilities in the commonplace."

Mays is currently an associate professor in Graduate Fine Arts and Undergraduate Photography at California College of the Arts

Mays was a 2009–2010 Fulbright Fellow in Santiago, Chile, where she worked with astronomers who are using the world's most advanced telescopes to look at the sky.

During her time at the observatory, she was given access to the institutional archive of rejected prints, negatives, and other ephemera.

This resulted in her body of work, "Sun Ruins," which functions as an umbrella for two distinct yet related bodies of work.