From Here to the Horizon: Photographs in Honor of Barry Lopez

Toby Jurovics, director of the Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment, and author Debra Gwartney discuss From Here to the Horizon: Photographs in Honor of Barry Lopez. We hope that this evening's virtual event will be as much a tribute to Lopez's life as is this recent catalog and exhibition inspired by his unparalleled body of work. Photographers Virginia Beahan, Terry Evans, David T. Hanson, Mark Klett, and Laura McPhee will join in conversation and celebration.

ABOUT THE BOOK

From Here to the Horizon presents work by fifty leading American landscape photographers assembled to honor of the life and influence of Barry Lopez (1945–2020), one of our most highly regarded writers about humankind’s relationship with the natural world. The images in the catalog were chosen in response to Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape, the “reader’s dictionary” of geographic terms compiled by Lopez and Gwartney. Standing as a marker of the admiration and affection of Lopez’s peers, this collection traces the profile of our national landscape, finding elegance and inspiration – and sometimes raising alarm – in the places we call home.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Toby Jurovics is the founding director of the Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment. He was chief curator of Joslyn Art Museum from 2011 to 2020, prior to which he was a curator of photography at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Princeton University Art Museum. A specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American landscape photography, he has curated over fifty exhibitions of photography, painting, works on paper, and new media. Jurovics is the author of Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O’Sullivan (2010) and has published essays on Thomas Joshua Cooper, Rick Dingus, Steve Fitch, John Gossage, Andrew Moore, William Sutton and the New Topographics.

Debra Gwartney is the author of two memoirs, including I Am a Stranger Here Myself (2019), winner of the River Teeth Nonfiction Prize and the Willa Award for Nonfiction. Her first book, Live Through This (2010), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Gwartney co-edited Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape (2006) with her husband Barry Lopez. She has published widely in journals including Granta, The Sun, Tin House, American Scholar, The Normal School, Creative Nonfiction and VQR, and she is the recipient of a 2020 Pushcart Prize. Gwartney lives in western Oregon.

Virginia Beahan uses a large format camera to explore the intersection between culture and nature in diverse geographic settings. Her first book, No Ordinary Land, was published in 1987 in collaboration with Laura McPhee and ranges from the volcanoes of Iceland to the painted caves of Italy. Cuba singing with bright tears (2009) examines a contested landscape in the waning years of Fidel Castro’s revolutionary Cuba, and her current project, Elegy for an Ancient Sea, is a meditation on environmental and social issues that collide in a surreal and remote section of California’s Colorado Desert. Beahan’s work has been widely exhibited and collected by institutions including The J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Princeton University Art Museum. Grants and fellowships include awards from the New England Foundation for the Arts, Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation. She currently teaches at Dartmouth College and resides in rural New Hampshire.

The prairie ecosystem is a guide for Terry Evans. She photographs the prairies and plains of North America and the urban prairie of Chicago. Combining both aerial and ground photography, she delves into the intricate and complex relationships that join land and its inhabitants. Evans has exhibited widely, including shows at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the Field Museum of Natural History and the Amon Carter Museum of Art. Her work is in numerous collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Nelson–Atkins Museum of Art. Evans' books include Heartland: The Photographs of Terry Evans (2012) and Prairie Stories (2013). She is a Guggenheim Fellow.

David T. Hanson was born and raised in Montana. He earned a B.A. in English Literature from Stanford University and an M.F.A. in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design, where he was a professor from 1983-2000. Hanson has been recognized with numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and two NEA fellowships. His photographs have been exhibited in museums including the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and are in the permanent collections of institutions throughout the world. In 1997, Aperture published Waste Land: Meditations on a Ravaged Landscape, a mid-career survey of Hanson’s photography. His other monographs include Colstrip, Montana (2010), Wilderness to Wasteland (2016) and The Cloud of Unknowing (2019).

Mark Klett is a photographer interested in places, history and time. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Japan/US Friendship Commission. His work has been exhibited and published widely in the United States and internationally and is held in over eighty museum collections worldwide. He is the author of nineteen books, including Seeing Time, Forty Years of Photographs (2020). Klett is Professor Emeritus at Arizona State University.

Laura McPhee’s photographs have been widely exhibited in the United States and abroad. The recipient of many grants and residencies including Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellowships, her work is included in the permanent collections the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Her exhibition River of No Return debuted at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston in 2006, and a monograph of the same title was published by Yale University Press in 2008. Her first book, No Ordinary Land, made in collaboration with Virginia Beahan, was published by Aperture in 1998. McPhee is a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.

This event is co-sponsored by the Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment, Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Terrain.org.