Exhibitions

Death Is Expensive
Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, Maine
May 23 - September 13, 2026

Death Is Expensive

Death Is Expensive brings together new work alongside a careful selection of works from the past twenty years in a layered reckoning with both the artist's private history and broader shared losses. These include diorama-like wall-mounted assemblages in wooden boxes made from 2008 onward, which often appear as modest reliquaries, and paintings housed in sculpted and painted frames. The exhibition's title is drawn from a line uttered by Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire: "How in the hell do you think all that sickness and dying was paid for? Death is expensive, Miss Stella!" View works

A Memorial to Ice at the Dead Deer Disco
MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts
March 12, 2022 - September 4, 2023

A Memorial to Ice at the Dead Deer Disco

Swanson's largest exhibition to date was presented at MASS MoCA, with a companion exhibition (Part 2) at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, New York, from July 16 to November 27, 2022. The two-venue installation linked the losses of the AIDS crisis, which Swanson lived through as a young gay man, with the ongoing losses of climate change. Reviewing the exhibition in The Boston Globe, Murray Whyte described it as "austerely, agonizingly beautiful."

Selected One-Person Exhibitions
2026 — Death Is Expensive, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, Maine

2024 — Like a Leaf Shadow, Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, CO

2022-23 — A Memorial to Ice at the Dead Deer Disco, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA

2022 — A Memorial to Ice at the Dead Deer Disco (Part 2), Thomas Cole National Historic Site, Catskill, NY

2019 — Bright Young Things, Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, CO

2017 — Inclinations, Inman Gallery, Houston, TX

2016 — Sorrow in Sunlight, Basilica Hudson Back Gallery, Hudson, New York

2015 — Chambre (Marc Swanson in collaboration with choreographer Jack Ferver), New Museum, New York, NY

2012 — New/Now, New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut

2011 — The Second Story, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, Texas

2010 — Dark Room, Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, Missouri

2010 — Acquisitions in Context: Marc Swanson, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri

2008 — Hurry on Sundown: The Multimedia Work of Marc Swanson, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

2007 — Marc Swanson, Marella Gallery, Milan, Italy

2007 — Beginning to See the Light, Museum of Contemporary Arts Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California

2005 — Marc Swanson, Bellwether Gallery, New York, New York

2003 — Live Free or Die, Bellwether Gallery, Brooklyn, New York

2001 — At First Sight, Bellwether Gallery, Brooklyn, New York

1999 — The Black Party, ESP Gallery, San Francisco, California

1998 — God Bless the Children of the Beast, Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden

1998 — Bats Like Me, ESP Gallery, San Francisco, California

1997 — Sub-Zero/Escene, , San Francisco, California

1996 — Nature's Way, Showroom, San Francisco, California