Jill O’Bryan, New Mexico © Alison Sirico

In 2026, Jill O’Bryan was awarded an Artist Fellowship to support the making of two monumental graphite drawings of Chupinas Mesa in northern New Mexico. Her Rock Frottages capture interactions with the desert landscape, lying down on large sheets of paper to create rubbings of the earth underneath: Recording my interactions with the dirt and rock, sifting through the desert rubble, which is alive with activity, I lie down and let the rock hold me. Then I draw this holding, which I experience as a resonance. I am not just scratching on the surface, so to speak, the drawings retrieve the land’s depth by revealing crevasses formed by wind and rain over millennia.

Jill O’Bryan divides her time between New York City and New Mexico. The subject of her work is the interaction of the human body with Earth’s environment. Early on, she discovered that she sees through touch—touching the air with breath, touching the land by lying down on it, touching the moon by meditating beneath it. She transforms these dynamic, elemental interactions into drawings, sculptures, collages, paintings, and installations. Across these media, her work grows out of lived, moment-to-moment interactions with the elements that shape our lives—air, earth, water, fire, and sky. O’Bryan has an MFA (1990) from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a Ph.D. (2000) from New York University specializing in Feminist Performance Art between 1970-2000.

Susan York’s work explores the relationships between form, space, and elemental materials. Rooted in a minimalist sensibility, her practice spans sculpture, drawing, prints, and site responsive installation. Inspired by the possibilities of her spare yet revelatory work, the Barry Lopez Foundation commissioned a print portfolio, The Color of Time, documenting the hidden colors of glacial ice that are exposed at its calving terminus. 

In May of 2025, York traveled to Glacier Bay, Alaska, to visit three tidewater glaciers, to witness in person the raw edge of geologic time exposed at the waterline. Within the body of a glacier, the passage of hundreds and thousands of years is stratified into visible layers, delineated in the ice as shifting shades of blue and green. Responding to this internal structure, the face of each print will be a shade of white corresponding to the glacier’s surface, while the reverse sides will be printed in variations of blue and green correlating to successive layers within the glacier revealed at glacier’s snout. The finished prints will float within the frame, allowing reflected color from their reverse sides to illuminate the edges. This tension between what is visible on the surface and the brilliant colors hidden from view on the reverse become a metaphor for the glacier’s own structure and the perception of millions of pounds of glacial ice appearing to levitate on a halo of light. The catastrophic melting of glaciers around the world is one of the most visible indicators of the transformations of the Anthropocene – the era of human-influenced geologic change – where geologic and human-scaled time are colliding. 

After being approached by the Barry Lopez Foundation, I conceived a project that challenged and expanded the scope of my artistic practice, working closely with the foundation’s director. The foundation marshaled support for my proposal from its earliest stages and found a skilled boat captain who instinctively understood what I needed to see and brought me within intimate distance of massive icebergs and the deep blue colors of recently calved glacier faces. The foundation has commissioned the creation of a series of prints, The Color of Time, that will delineate and preserve my first-hand experience in Alaska. —Susan York

Susan York is known for reductive work in graphite and porcelain. Her cast and drawn forms engage with the particularities of architectural space, combining precise geometry with asymmetry and tension. York’s site-sensitive installations engage the existing architecture of a chosen site: a room, a wall, or a sheet of paper. Her studies in graphite are a homage to subtlety, with irregularities interrupting otherwise austere geometric forms and producing results that are more felt than seen. York’s influences stem from a number of sources, including her friendship with mentor Agnes Martin, the Dutch De Stijl movement, and the effects of working in the expansive desert landscape of the American Southwest. Her primary questions are rooted in the transitions between two and three dimensions. She explores what happens when one state becomes another, asking how solid form can be taken apart and rendered flat, and investigating how a flat shape can be made three dimensional. Her work initiates an immersive experience, allowing objects to dematerialize into the space that surrounds them, challenging unconscious perceptions of form and space. In 2024, York was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to support ongoing research and exploration of Iceland’s shifting glacial landscape, expanding on work begun as part of her Artist Fellowship from the Barry Lopez Foundation.

In 2023, the Barry Lopez Foundation co-commissioned a new work by composer John Luther Adams, Crossing Open Ground, in partnership with the Aspen Music Festival and School. Taking its name from a 1988 collection of Barry Lopez’s essays, Crossing Open Ground was inspired by John and Barry’s decades-long friendship and their mutual connection to landscapes in Alaska and beyond.  A large-scale work for winds, brass, and percussion intended to be performed on an expansive outdoor state, it is scored for forty musicians, with a variable duration of roughly 54 to 81 minutes, allowing the music to breathe with terrain, light and audience movement. The world premiere took place on a shimmering August afternoon at the Aspen Music Festival in 2023. 

In this time when we humans have become a geologic force, most of us live in increasingly homogenous environments and in the amorphous nonplaces of the internet. Searching for real experiences in real places, we travel to far-flung destinations, where we make photographs of ourselves to prove that we were there. Yet it’s increasingly rare that we are fully present anywhere, and the knowledge that we truly belong to any place eludes many of us. Crossing Open Ground is a ceremony of rediscovery and re-consecration of place— an invitation to listen to the older, deeper resonances beneath our feet, wherever we may be. Each musician and each listener is free to follow their own individual path through the physical and musical landscape of the work. Out of the experience of walking and listening together, a renewed sense of community and place emerges. The title, Crossing Open Ground, is borrowed from a book by my dear friend, the late Barry Lopez, to whom the work is dedicated. —John Luther Adams 

Since its debut at the Aspen Music Festival, Crossing Open Ground has been performed at Lincoln Center, NYC in April 2024; Snow Canyon State Park, St. George, Utah in October 2025; Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn in May 2026; and, upcoming in the fall of 2026, at the Boston University Tanglewood Institute Campus, Lenox, MA.

Read John Luther Adams on his friendship with Barry Lopez: Orion, The Liminal Line: Remembering Barry Lopez, 2024

John Luther Adams, Aspen, CO, August 6, 2023 © Diego Redel

For almost forty years, John Luther Adams made his home in the boreal forest of interior Alaska, where he discovered a unique musical world grounded in space, stillness, and elemental forces.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Adams worked full-time as an environmental activist. But the time came when he felt compelled to dedicate himself entirely to music. He made this choice with the belief that, ultimately, music can do more than politics to change the world. Since that time, he has become one of the most widely admired and influential composers in the world, receiving the Pulitzer Prize, a Grammy Award, and many other honors. In works such as Become Ocean, Become Desert, An Atlas of Deep Time, and Canticles of the Holy Wind, Adams brings the sense of wonder that we feel outdoors into the concert hall. His outdoor works such as Inuksuit, Sila: The Breath of the World, and Crossing Open Ground invite us to remember and reclaim our connections with place, wherever we may be.

Now in his 70s, Adams’s deep concern for the state of the earth and the future of humanity drives him to continue composing. As he puts it: “If we can imagine a culture and a society in which we each feel more deeply responsible for our own place in the world, then we just may be able to bring that culture and that society into being.” Since leaving Alaska, Adams and his wife Cynthia have lived in the Sonoran Desert of Mexico, the Atacama Desert of Chile, and the Chihuahuan Desert of New Mexico. They now make their home in the Red Centre of Australia.