What is our response as a community of artists to the fate of the earth?
— Barry Lopez
While writing about the landscape often begins in the aesthetic, it must always tend to the ethical. Lopez’s intense attentiveness was, I came later to realize, a form of moral gaze, born of his belief that if we attend more closely to something then we are less likely to act selfishly towards it. To exercise a care of attention towards a place – as towards a person – is to achieve a sympathetic intimacy with it.
— Robert Macfarlane
Climate change is transforming the planet, and by the end of the current century the landscape as we know it will be unrecognizable. Familiar cadences—from the arrival of migrating songbirds in the spring to the chill of the first frost—have already become unpredictable. Glaciers and rivers are disappearing, summer skies have darkened with smoke, and the land is falling silent. What will it mean when the places that have nurtured and inspired us are gone? How will our understanding of the world change when there is no longer ice in the Arctic or wildlife in the forest? What are our obligations to the planet, and to each other?
The Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment organizes fine art exhibitions and creative fellowships in the visual arts, literature, and music addressing climate change, biodiversity, habitat loss, and our changing relationship with the planet. Although it has become necessary to imagine a very different future than the one we had expected, art can offer more than a requiem for what has been lost. Collaborating with contemporary photographers, painters, graphic artists, video and installation artists, and composers, the Barry Lopez Foundation believes that the arts can help us navigate the decisions we are being asked to make about our future, sustain our connection to the natural world, and inspire an ethical relationship with the land.
Barry Lopez, Eugene, Oregon, August 5, 2020 © Ron Jude
For five decades, Barry Lopez wrote about humanity, nature, and the profound influence of the landscape in shaping who we are. Championing a community of colleagues and friends whose work shared a common goal—to help—he was committed to providing a platform for artists, writers, and musicians to engage with the most urgent dialogue of our time. Imagining the Foundation as a “strike force for the arts,” Lopez aspired to create a forum for the conversation surrounding global climate change and our fate.
Art and Environment Year Five
Spring 2026 marks the fifth anniversary of the Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment – here’s what we’ve accomplished so far:
Organized three original exhibitions that were seen in ten cities across the United States
From Here to the Horizon: Photographs in Honor of Barry Lopez published with Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska – Lincoln
Chamber orchestra Crossing Open Ground, composed by John Luther Adams in honor of Barry Lopez, performed in Aspen; New York City; St. George; Utah; and Brooklyn, NY
The Color of Time, a print portfolio based on the colors of receding glacial ice in Alaska, commissioned with Santa Fe artist Susan York
Coming This Year
Two new exhibitions, Spiraling: Photographs of the Great Salt Lake by David Maisel and Ten Thousand Birds: Avian Life in the Anthropocene
Artist Fellowship awarded to Jill O’Bryan to create two monumental “Rock Frottage” drawings
Rebecca Solnit named to the inaugural Barry Lopez Foundation Writing Fellowship at Ucross
For more information on the Foundation, see HISTORY.
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