Maura Brewer (United States, 1984) is a video artist based in Los Angeles and New York.

Maura Brewer makes investigative essay videos that explore the relationship between art, money and crime. Her practice is research-based and interdisciplinary, resulting in video, installation, writing, and drawing that draw together materials from a variety of sources. Her work combines documentary-style footage with hand-drawn animations, appropriated media, and public records, to create essayistic collages that tell stories about the financialization of art. Her projects aim to bridge the gap between the lived experiences of artists and the invisible legal and economic systems that govern and constrain their actions.

Brewer is a Guggenheim fellow, and a recipient of the Creative Capital Award and the Lens Award at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her work has been shown internationally at venues including MoMA, Art in General, the MCA and the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, and her projects have received press coverage in outlets including Art in America, Bomb, Hyperallergic and the Paris Review. Brewer received her MFA from the University of California, Irvine in 2011 and was a Whitney Independent Study Program fellow in 2015. In addition to her art practice, Brewer works as a private investigator at Lynx Insights and Investigations in Los Angeles.

During Brewer’s time at AiR 351, she will be working on The Plum Blossoms, a project that traces the history of a lost Matisse painting. The project documents Brewer’s investigation into the history of the painting, which was sold by the Matisse family to an unidentified buyer in 1970, disappeared for 35 years, and reemerged in 2005 when it was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. Using the painting as a lens, the project will tell a story about the changing role of art in the late 20th and 21st centuries, the birth of the global art market, and its impact on the lives of working artists.