SANTA FE, NM.- The Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment works with contemporary artists to organize exhibitions addressing climate change, biodiversity, habitat loss, and our relationship with the land in a time of environmental crisis. Collaborating with photographers, painters, printmakers, composers, and video and installation artists, the Barry Lopez Foundation organizes two exhibitions annually, which it makes available free of charge to museums, galleries, and other public venues throughout the United States.

Barry Lopez, winner of the 1986 National Book Award for Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, championed a community of artists whose work shared a common goal: to help. Asserting that our relationship with the natural world is of moral and ethical consequence, Lopez believed it was time for artists and writers to take their place in the conversation about the future of our planet and help alert people to the immediacy and enormity of the climate crisis. Through its exhibitions and programs, the foundation established in his name creates projects that match the intimate connection with the natural world found in Lopez’s writing and reflect his belief in the importance of the land in shaping who we are as individuals and as a culture.


Janet Biggs, Brightness All Around (video still), 2011, single-channel HD video with sound, 16×9 format, running time: 8:36

Hugh M. Davies, the Barry Lopez Foundation’s board chair, added, “It is with a sense of admiration for Barry Lopez and his remarkable career and a commitment to contemporary art’s unique capacity to engage people with challenging issues that we launched the foundation. We look forward to reaching audiences throughout the country with compelling work that addresses one of the most important messages of our time.”

The foundation is currently offering two exhibitions. Ron Jude: 12 Hz references the limits of human perception—12 Hz marks the lowest threshold of human hearing, suggesting the powerful yet often imperceptible forces that shape the physical world, from plate tectonics to glacial erosion to the incomprehensibility of geological time. Made in Oregon, California, Hawaii, and Iceland, Jude’s imposing, large-scale black-and-white photographs describe the raw materials of the planet and its systems—lava flows, tidal currents, and glacial valleys—that form the underpinnings of organic life. Stripped bare of our presence, they allude to the immense scale and veiled mechanics of phenomena that operate indifferent to human enterprise in a time of ecological and political crisis. 12 Hz is accompanied by an audio installation by Joshua Bonnetta, Pressure Plates I & II, featuring two interacting compositions of field recordings made by Bonnetta and manipulated seismic recordings that rise and fall from opposite sides of the gallery against the rhythm of Jude’s photographs.


Janet Biggs, Fade to White (video still), 2010, single-channel HD video with sound, 16×9 format, running time: 12:28.

Janet Biggs: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape takes its name from the subtitle of Lopez’s most influential work. The exhibition features three videos – Warning Shot, 2016, Brightness All Around, 2011, and Fade to White, 2010 – filmed when Biggs traveled to Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago halfway between Europe and the North Pole, with a group of artists and scientists aboard a two-masted schooner built in 1910. Her works are a requiem for a heroic landscape, one that will be completely transformed within our lifetimes. Playing against the tension between idealization and reality, Biggs unseats our expectations about the Arctic as a pristine, uninhabited wilderness. The subject of centuries of exploration by Europe and the New World, the region was once seen as so vast and inhospitable as to be immune to human imposition; now, climate change is projected to leave polar summers ice-free within twenty years. Each video challenges our understanding of the Arctic landscape from an individual perspective, whether a solitary figure firing a signal flare over the frozen horizon, a coal miner descending miles beneath the surface to begin her workday, or a solo kayaker paddling toward a featureless horizon.

The Barry Lopez Foundation is also pleased to announce an upcoming partnership with the Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska-Lincoln on the exhibition From Here to the Horizon: Photographs in Honor of Barry Lopez. The gift of fifty American landscape photographers who assembled to honor Lopez’s life and influence, this collection includes work by Virginia Beahan, Barbara Bosworth, Lois Conner, Frank Gohlke, Emmet Gowin, Mark Klett, David Maisel, and Laura McPhee, among others. Scheduled to open at the Sheldon in February of 2023, the exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with contributions from Debra Gwartney, Robert Macfarlane, and Toby Jurovics, director of the Barry Lopez Foundation. Other upcoming exhibitions being developed by the Barry Lopez Foundation address themes of avian life in the Anthropocene, the future of ice, and the night sky.

At this critical moment in our history, art can offer more than a requiem for what has been lost. Although it has become necessary to imagine a very different future than the one we had hoped for, the Barry Lopez Foundation believes that art can help us navigate the overwhelming decisions we are being asked to make about our fate by sustaining our connection to the natural world.

For further information about the Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment and our current exhibitions, please see barrylopezfoundation.org