©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 pay attention to the land beneath their feet. From Here to the Horizon: Photographs in Honor of Barry Lopez, recently opened at the California Museum of Photography at UCR ARTS, is an answer to that call. 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 together photographs by 50 artists in a rare and ambitious gathering of voices that have spent careers looking closely at the U.S. land.

The late author Barry Lopez (1945–2020) is best remembered for Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (1986), winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction. For more than 50 years he traveled to the planet’s most remote places and returned with prose of extraordinary patience and depth. His central subject was always relationship: between people and landscapes, between memory and geography, between what we name and what we 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 draws on the tradition of landscape photography to illuminate his writings. From badlands and sandhills to old-growth forests and slot canyons, from the New England coast to the Great Lakes, the photographs evoke the distinctive character of American topography. What unites them is not subject matter but disposition: these are images that hold the land with a certain gravity, finding it at once quotidian and mythic, welcoming and forbidding. Together, they ask what it means to truly know a place and what will become of these treasures in a world rapidly evolving in response to our climate crisis.

©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,” said 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 include 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, among others. While recent photographic traditions have often centered on the human-altered landscape, these photographers also embrace the lyricism, elegance, and resilience of the natural world itself. Their images trace a collective geography of home, memory, and imagination.

©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 term 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 terms that he compiled with his spouse, the writer Debra Gwartney, and other authors. The result is a conversation between image and language that feels as natural as it is revelatory.

©Lucinda Devlin, “Lake Huron, 5-10-2011 8:43pm” from the series “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 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 60 exhibitions and published 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 landscape and its influence on our collective imagination. He received the National Book Award in 1986 for Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape and was also the author of Of Wolves and Men and the memoir Horizon and three volumes of collected essays. Lopez received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Guggenheim, Lannan, and National Science Foundation fellowships, among 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 photography museum of the University of California. With more than 500,000 objects, it holds one of the major photography collections in the United States. The museum serves diverse local, national, and international audiences through research, exhibitions, education, programming, and publications. The Culver Center of the Arts advances the understanding and appreciation of the arts through extraordinary experiences in contemporary visual and performing art, as well as a rich ongoing film program. Culver Center facilities include a 72-seat screening room, computer lab, dance studios, Sweeney Art Gallery and other exhibitions spaces, and a black box studio and recording studio.

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