Anastasia Samoylova: Atlantic Coast
Atlantic Coast is both a major new exhibition and an accompanying publication that together chart Anastasia Samoylova’s most recent photographic journey. Seventy years after Berenice Abbott documented the length of U.S. Route 1, Samoylova retraces the historic road from Key West, Florida, to Fort Kent, Maine, using her camera to examine the evolving story of America through its landscapes and communities.
Abbott’s 1954 project anticipated the sweeping changes the Interstate Highway System would bring to small towns and major cities alike. Building on that legacy, Samoylova records a nation still marked by expansion and rupture, where industry, commerce, and consumer culture press up against the natural world. Working in both color and black and white, she moves beyond simple geography to create a layered narrative in which light, symbols, and recurring motifs expose the tensions between nostalgia and progress, myth and reality.
The resulting photographs form Atlantic Coast, a book co-published by Aperture and the Norton Museum of Art. Beautifully produced, it brings together Samoylova’s reflections on dislocation, resilience, and the shifting contours of the American dream.
The exhibition Anastasia Samoylova: Atlantic Coast will be on view at the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, from November 15, 2025, through March 1, 2026. Presented at an institution that itself stands on U.S. 1, the show situates Samoylova’s images within the very landscape they evoke.
Together, the book and exhibition highlight Samoylova’s role as both documentarian and storyteller, offering a timely meditation on place, memory, and identity, and inviting viewers and readers alike to consider the American landscape as a mirror of the country’s contradictions and aspirations.
About the Author
Anastasia Samoylova is a U.S.-based artist whose practice moves fluidly between documentary observation and constructed imagery. Her recent solo exhibition, Floridas: Anastasia Samoylova and Walker Evans, was presented at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from October 14, 2024, through May 11, 2025.
Since settling in Miami in 2016, Samoylova has developed a distinctive way of working that immerses her in the environments she photographs. This approach first crystallized in her debut monograph, FloodZone, which examined how communities at risk of flooding visualize and live with environmental precarity. With Floridas, she turned her attention to the state’s cultural contradictions and political fault lines, creating a multifaceted portrait that is both critical and playful. In Image Cities (2023), her lens shifted to global metropolises, where she traced how media and advertising imagery infiltrate and reshape the built environment.
Her forthcoming body of work, Atlantic Coast, will premiere at the Norton Museum of Art in fall 2025 alongside a new monograph published by Aperture. Revisiting and expanding upon Berenice Abbott’s landmark 1954 Route 1 project, Samoylova reconsiders the symbolism of the American road, questioning how myths of freedom, mobility, and belonging continue to define national identity today.
Samoylova has exhibited widely, with recent shows at the Saatchi Gallery in London, the Nasher Museum of Art, C/O Berlin, V&A Dundee, Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid and Barcelona, Amerika Haus Munich, the George Eastman Museum, the Chrysler Museum of Art, and Kunst Haus Wien.
Her photographs are included in the permanent collections of major institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, among others. Her published books include FloodZone (Steidl, 2019), Floridas (Steidl, 2022), Image Cities (Fundación MAPFRE/Hatje Cantz, 2023), and Adaptation (Thames & Hudson, 2024).
Anastasia Samoylova: Atlantic Coast
from November 15, 2025, through March 1, 2026
Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach – FL – USA
