Event Info

On the twentieth anniversary of The Great Picture (2006), hear photographers Jacques Garnier and Clayton Spada discuss the difficulties and triumphs of making the image that set the Guinness World Record for the largest print photograph, while curators Dennis Keeley and Tyler Stallings discuss how they overcame the challenges of display to bring it to the public.

The Great Picture: Revisiting the Legacy Project is guest curated by Dawn Hassett, with contributions from Nikolay Maslov, Curator of Special Projects. The exhibition is organized in conjunction with the retrospective exhibition Dispatches: The Photography of Douglas McCulloh, 1990–2025, on view at the museum in fall 2026.

The Great Picture: Revisiting the Legacy Project was made possible with generous support from an anonymous donor. Programs at UCR ARTS are supported by the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (CHASS), and by the City of Riverside.

Image: Rob Johnson, 2006. Courtesy of the artist.

Speaker Bios:

For the last decade, Jacques Garnier’s work has focused on using minimalism and negative space to operate at the core of abstraction. He has developed a practice both rigorously formal and profoundly contemplative, grounded in the belief that seeing itself can be a philosophical act.   Garnier’s images invite slowness – a kind of seeing that becomes meditation.  Freed from the constraints of context, he creates images of stillness. “I find fascinating the tension between the mind, which seeks to understand, and the body, which simply feels.” 

Clayton Spada is an artist, author and curator, and has also been a photography/multimedia educator for over 28 years. He is, along with the late Jerry Burchfield and Mark Chamberlain, a founding member of The Legacy Project. His work has been exhibited internationally across a span of four decades, published in photography annuals, periodicals and textbooks, and is held in a number of institutional and private collections in the United States and abroad.

Dennis Keeley is a Los Angeles based artist. His photographs have been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions, and his work published internationally in books and studies addressing urban circumstances. Keeley has photographs in the permanent collections of LACMA, MOCA, and the Getty Trust, Conservation and Research Institutes. 

Keeley is the former Chair of the Photography and Imaging Program at Art Center College of Design, and has served on the Board of Directors of Angels Gate Cultural Center in San Pedro. 

Tyler Stallings is a Southern California–based curator, writer, and researcher whose work spans contemporary art and visual culture, with a sustained emphasis on photography and lens-based practices. Notable exhibitions and publications include Truthiness: Photography as Sculpture; Osuna: Mexican Revolution Photographs; Empty Vessels – Amir Zaki; and Botany of Transcendence: Mythic Plants through the Lens of Naida Osline. He curated The Great Picture: The World’s Largest Photograph in 2011 within the two-story atrium at UCR’s Culver Center of the Arts, presented in a cyclorama configuration. He is also the author of Aridtopia: Essays on Art & Culture from Deserts in the Southwest United States and has edited or contributed to anthologies including Whiteness: A Wayward Construction, Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas, and Uncontrollable Bodies: Testimonies of Identity and Culture. He received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). www.tylerstallings.com.

Exhibitions On View