FROM HERE TO THE HORIZON: Photographs in Honor of Barry Lopez

©Virginia Beahan, “17 Palms Oasis, Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, California,” 2013, The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez, Sheldon Museum of Art.

Barry Lopez spent 50 years asking Americans to concentrate to the land beneath their toes. From Here to the Horizon: Photographs in Honor of Barry Lopez, lately opened on the California Museum of Photography at UCR ARTS, is a solution to that decision. Organized by the Sheldon Museum of Art and the Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment, the exhibition arrives at UCR ARTS as its West Coast premiere, bringing collectively pictures by 50 artists in a uncommon and bold gathering of voices which have spent careers wanting intently on the U.S. land.

The late writer Barry Lopez (1945–2020) is greatest remembered for Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (1986), winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction. For greater than 50 years he traveled to the planet’s most distant locations and returned with prose of extraordinary endurance and depth. His central topic was all the time relationship: between folks and landscapes, between reminiscence and geography, between what we title and what we all know.

©David Maisel, “Terminal Mirage 14,” 2003, The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez, Sheldon Museum of Art.

From Here to the Horizon attracts on the custom of panorama images to light up his writings. From badlands and sandhills to old-growth forests and slot canyons, from the New England coast to the Great Lakes, the images evoke the distinctive character of American topography. What unites them is just not subject material however disposition: these are photographs that maintain the land with a sure gravity, discovering it directly quotidian and mythic, welcoming and forbidding. Together, they ask what it means to really know a spot and what is going to grow to be of those treasures in a world quickly evolving in response to our local weather disaster.

©Barbara Bosworth, “Moon Rising, the Night the Bird Was Singing, Carlisle, Massachusetts,” 2006, The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez, Sheldon Museum of Art

“Today, the majority of us raise our families, go to school, find employment, and locate much of our inspiration in urban areas,” stated Barry Lopez. “The land beyond our towns, for many, has become a generalized landscape of hills and valleys, of beaches, rivers and monotonous deserts. Almost against our wills the countrysides of our parents’ and grandparents’ generation—the Salinas Valley we might have once pictured reading John Steinbeck, images of Sarah Orne Jewett’s Maine or the barefoot country of Eudora Welty’s stories, of Willa Cather’s Nebraska and New Mexico—almost without knowing it, the particulars of these landscapes have slipped away from us.”

©Laura McPhee, “Irrigator’s Tarp Directing Water, Fourth of July Creek Ranch, Custer County, Idaho,” 2004, The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez, Sheldon Museum of Art.

Featured artists embody Robert Adams, Virginia Beahan, Barbara Bosworth, Lois Conner, Linda Connor, Terry Evans, Frank Gohlke, Emmet Gowin, David T. Hanson, Alex Harris, Ron Jude, Mark Klett, Laura McPhee, Mary Peck, Edward Ranney, Mark Ruwedel, Joel Sternfeld, Bob Thall, and Geoff Winningham, amongst others. While latest photographic traditions have usually centered on the human-altered panorama, these photographers additionally embrace the lyricism, magnificence, and resilience of the pure world itself. Their photographs hint a collective geography of residence, reminiscence, and creativeness.

©Terry Evans, “Platte River, Nebraska,” 1990, The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez, Sheldon Museum of Art.

©David T. Hanson, “Yankee Doodle Tailings Pond, Tailings Dam, and Leach Pads, Butte, Montana,” 1991, printed 2020, The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez, Sheldon Museum of Art.

Each {photograph} is paired with a geographical time period and accompanying definition drawn from Lopez’s Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape (2006), the “reader’s dictionary” of land and water formation phrases that he compiled along with his partner, the author Debra Gwartney, and different authors. The result’s a dialog between picture and language that feels as pure as it’s revelatory.

©Lucinda Devlin, “Lake Huron, 5-10-2011 8:43pm” from the sequence “Lake Pictures,” 2011, The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez, Sheldon Museum of Art.

About the Curator
Toby Jurovics is founding director of the Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment. Prior to this, he was chief curator at Joslyn Art Museum and a curator of images on the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Princeton University Art Museum. A specialist in nineteenth and twentieth century American panorama images, he has curated over 60 exhibitions and revealed essays on Thomas Joshua Cooper, Steve Fitch, John Gossage, Timothy O’Sullivan, and the New Topographics.

About the Author
Barry Lopez (1945–2020) explored the panorama and its affect on our collective creativeness. He obtained the National Book Award in 1986 for Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape and was additionally the writer of Of Wolves and Men and the memoir Horizon and three volumes of collected essays. Lopez obtained the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Guggenheim, Lannan, and National Science Foundation fellowships, amongst others.

From Here to the Horizon: Photographs in Honor of Barry Lopez is curated by Toby Jurovics, Director, Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment, Santa Fe, and is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue (Trinity University Press, 2023). The exhibition was organized by Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln and the Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment. Kathryn Poindexter-Akers, Head of Exhibitions, is coordinating curator of the exhibition for UCR ARTS. Programs at UCR ARTS are supported by the City of Riverside.

About UCR Arts
UCR ARTS is the California Museum of Photography and the Culver Center of the Arts. Founded in 1973, the California Museum of Photography is the images museum of the University of California. With greater than 500,000 objects, it holds one of many main images collections within the United States. The museum serves numerous native, nationwide, and worldwide audiences by analysis, exhibitions, schooling, programming, and publications. The Culver Center of the Arts advances the understanding and appreciation of the humanities by extraordinary experiences in modern visible and performing artwork, in addition to a wealthy ongoing movie program. Culver Center services embody a 72-seat screening room, laptop lab, dance studios, Sweeney Art Gallery and different exhibitions areas, and a black field studio and recording studio.

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