Join us for a conversation with photographers Laura McPhee, Terry Evans, and Mark Klett, moderated by Toby Jurovics, about their landscape work in relation to the writings of Barry Lopez.

From Here to the Horizon: Photographs in Honor of Barry Lopez explores our connection to the land through photography. The exhibition brings together photographs by fifty artists, offering a sweeping portrait of the diverse landscapes that shape our lives and imaginations. 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—at once quotidian and mythic, welcoming and forbidding. Collectively, the exhibition explores the power of place and the ways photographs help us see, understand, and re-connect with the land.

From Here to the Horizon was inspired by the work of American author Barry Lopez (1945–2020), best known for Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (1986), for which he won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Lopez spent more than fifty years traveling the world and writing about the deep ties between people and nature.

Speakers:

Terry Evans photographs the prairies and plains of North America combining both aerial and ground photography. She delves into the complex relationships of land and people, advocating for environmental justice and celebrating the intricacies of prairie ecosystems where she finds them. Evans is a Guggenheim Fellow and a recipient of an Anonymous Was a Woman award. She has had one person shows at the Chicago Art Institute, Field Museum of Natural History, Amon Carter Museum of Art, and a retrospective show at Nelson Atkins Museum of Art. Her work is in many museum collections including the Spencer Museum of Art, the primary repository of her work.

Laura McPhee’s landscape photographs made  in the American west provoke questions about our attitudes and beliefs about the earth we inhabit, questions sometimes environmental, sometimes cultural or geographical. Made with film and a large-format view camera, the photographs envelop time, both geologic and human.  Laura’s work has been widely exhibited both in the United States and abroad and she has had the good fortune to be the recipient of a number of grants and residencies.  Her photographs are included in the permanent collections of many museums, including the Getty Center, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Laura McPhee enjoyed decades of teaching extraordinary students at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.

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 in the United States and internationally for over forty years, and is held in over eighty museum collections worldwide. He is the author of twenty books. Klett is Professor Emeritus at Arizona State University.

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.

Image: 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.