For over a decade, I have made investigative essay videos that explore the relationship between art, money, and crime. My practice is research-based, resulting in video installations that draw together materials including court records, appropriated footage, performance documentation, interviews, and diagrammatic animations. My video installations take the form essayistic collages that tell stories about the financialization of art. I often think of my work as a kind of landscape painting, in which the landscape being depicted is not the material world, but the invisible legal and economic structures of high finance. My goal is to bridge the gap between the lives of working artists and the economic systems that govern and constrain our actions.  

In 2024, I completed Offshore, a performance and video in which documents my attempts to launder money through art acquisition. The project received support from the Guggenheim Foundation and Creative Capital. The video follows my movements as I travel to Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, and Hong Kong, and learn to create a complex corporate architecture to conceal and move money. Offshore explores the relationship between the global art market, the colonial history of tax havens, and the realities of being an artist in late capitalism.

I am a 2026 MacDowell Fellow, 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2022 Creative Capital awardee, a recipient of the LENS Award at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Fellowship for Visual Arts at the California Community Foundation and the City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship. My work has been exhibited internationally at venues including MoMA, Art in General, the MCA in Chicago, and the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève. My projects have received press coverage in The Paris Review, CBS News, Art Agenda and the Guardian. I live in Astoria, Queens, where I work as a private investigator.  

Alongside my video practice, I have also participated in a number of collaborations. I am a co-founder of The Rational Dress Society, a counter-fashion collective, and Arts Research Collective, an experimental art school. On holidays, I make videos with the artist Pau S. Pescador.  

Contact

Maura Brewer Studio, Astoria, NY
Email: mqbrewer@gmail.com
Instagram: @maurabrewer