Matt Black awarded 2025 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant

Matt Black New World Atlas California and Nevada

The Robert Koch Gallery is pleased to share that gallery artist Matt Black has been awarded a prestigious 2025 Pollock‑Krasner Foundation Grant, recognizing his powerful work documenting the country’s social and environmental issues. His photographs confront economic inequality, migration, and climate impact with unflinching honesty. The Pollock‑Krasner Foundation Grant will support Black’s ongoing New World Atlas series, structured in 17 chapters, one for each state west of the 100th meridian. We are proud to represent Matt Black and to support his ongoing practice.

New World Atlas is organized in a series of 17 chapters, one for each state lying west of the 100th meridian. This exhibition presents California & Nevada, the first two chapters of this larger body of work. In this series Black departs from conventional photographic representation and incorporates technologies that extend human perception. Thermal imaging makes the invisible visible, allowing viewers to witness heat as a signifier of change, from drought and fire to evaporation. Infrared photography distinguishes the living from the inert, exposing a shifting terrain beneath what once seemed immutable.

Matt Black’s work has been featured in The New Yorker, TIME Magazine, National Geographic, Harper’s, and The California Sunday Magazine, as well as international publications including Le Monde (France) and Internazionale (Italy), among others. A member of Magnum Photos, Black has been honored three times by the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Prize, named a senior fellow at the Emerson Collective, and received the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Award for Humanistic Photography in 2015.

Matt Black’s exhibition New World Atlas was on view at the Robert Koch Gallery, May 1 — July 26, 2025. View the exhibition using the following link.

David Carmona