The Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment works with contemporary artists to organize exhibitions addressing climate change, biodiversity, habitat loss, and our relationship with the land in a time of environmental crisis.

Collaborating with photographers, painters, printmakers, composers, and video and installation artists, the Barry Lopez Foundation circulates its projects to museums, galleries, and other public venues in order to reach a wide range of audiences beyond those served by traditional exhibition models.

Climate change is already 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 and the blossom of spring flowers to the chill of the first frost—will become unpredictable. Glaciers and rivers will disappear, summer skies will darken with smoke, and the land will fall silent. What will it mean when the places that have shaped and sustained 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?

At this critical moment in our history, art can offer more than a requiem for what has been lost. Facilitating partnerships between artists, scientists, naturalists, and writers, the Barry Lopez Foundation fosters public engagement about the climate crisis through exhibitions inspired by the same urgency and affection for the land that informed Lopez’s writing. Although it has become necessary to imagine a very different future than the one we had hoped for, the Barry Lopez Foundation believes that art can help us navigate the overwhelming decisions we are being asked to make about our fate and sustain our connection to the natural world.