The Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment was inspired by a question,
How do you visualize a global catastrophe?
At the Foundation’s first board meeting in October 2020, Lopez affirmed that it was time for writers and artists to no longer be the “warm-up band” for serious discussions about our fate and to be recognized on the same footing as scientists, policy analysts, and politicians: Nothing can be more tedious than people talking about global climate change. But that’s not what we are really doing. We are trying to help people hear and see and have a tactile experience… [empowering] them to imagine their place in this very difficult environment. Four hundred and thirty parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or seven feet of projected feet of sea level rise are almost impossible for us to visualize. Lopez believed that the ability of artists and writers to foster empathy and understanding was the most powerful and effective way to help us recognize the threat of global climate change and inform the decisions we must make about our future and the future of the planet.
Ron Jude: 12 Hz, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, December 11, 2021 – March 13, 2022
The Barry Lopez Foundation’s inaugural exhibition, Ron Jude: 12 Hz, opened at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon in December 2021, a year after Lopez’s passing. Since that time, our exhibitions have been seen at museums in Arkansas, California, Idaho, Nebraska, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Texas.
In partnership with Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the Foundation published From Here to the Horizon: Photographs in Honor of Barry Lopez in 2023 to accompany the exhibition of the same name, which continues to travel to venues across the West.
Crossing Open Ground, Aspen, CO, © Diego Redel
In the summer of 2023, the Barry Lopez Foundation and the Aspen Music Festival and School co-commissioned John Luther Adams’s Crossing Open Ground in Lopez’s honor. An outdoor work for brass, winds, and percussion named after a collection of Lopez’s essays, it has since been performed at Lincoln Center, NYC (2024); Snow Canyon State Park, St. George, Utah (2025); and Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn (2026). Its next performance will be at the Boston University Tanglewood Institute Campus, Lenox, MA in August 2026.
Susan York making color studies, Glacier Bay, Alaska, May 2025
The Foundation launched its Artist Fellowship program in 2024 with Santa Fe sculptor and printmaker Susan York, commissioning a print portfolio based on the colors of ice in the tidewater glaciers of southeastern Alaska.
In 2026, Rebecca Solnit was awarded the inaugural Barry Lopez Foundation Writing Fellowship, in partnership with the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming.