January 2023-August 2026

Exhibition venues: California Museum of Photography, UC Riverside, CA, 2026; Museum of Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, 2024; Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE and the Barry Lopez Foundation for Art and Environment, Santa FE, NM, 2023

For over five decades, Barry Lopez explored the landscape through prose that offered a vivid and passionate account of our relationship with the natural world. His careful and conscientious descriptions of place were an inspiration for many artists, who discovered a sympathetic connection with his intimate understanding of the world around us. In recognition of Lopez’s lasting influence, fifty photographers donated a collection of prints in his honor.

From the quotidian to the mythic, their images trace the profile of the landscapes we call home and the ones that fill our imaginations. While American photography has spent much of its recent history exploring the “human-altered landscape,” it never abandoned the pleasure to be found in the elegance and lyricism of the land itself. Together, these photographers have created a catalog of American places, from New England to the Great Lakes to the mountains and deserts of the West, offering vistas that are welcoming and inspiring, reassuring and sometimes ominous.

These photographs will reside in the Sheldon Museum of Art’s permanent collection.

Modern Women, Modern Vision: Works from the Bank of America Collection
Munson Museum of Art, Utica, NY,
October 2024—January 2025

Since photography’s inception in the mid-nineteenth century, women have stood among its artistic and technological pioneers, at the forefront of every photographic movement and style. Modern Women | Modern Vision: Photographs from the Bank of America Collection features works by some of the leading artists of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Diverse in style, tone, and subject, these images range from spontaneous to composed, detached to empathetic, monumental to intimate.

Other venues include: Bakersfield Museum of Art, Bakersfield, CA, 2024; Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, OH, 2023; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO, 2022; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA, 2022; Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL, 2020; Napa Valley Museum, Yountville, CA, 2019-20

September 2022

A portion of Beahan/McPhee’s photographic archive has been acquired by Yale University’s Beinecke Library. Negatives and prints from their collaborative work entitled No Ordinary Land, and a later project not yet published, The Country Between Us, will be catalogued, exhibited, and made available to researchers and scholars at this distinguished institution. Also included is a rich correspondence between the two artists and others, journals made while working, and maps with notations used during their journeys.

June 29–October 10, 2021

The contemporary photographers in this exhibition create large-scale works that expand our understanding of what landscape photography can be. Like Mario Giacomelli, whose work is on view in the concurrent exhibition Mario Giacomelli: Figure/Ground, they favor graphically abstract compositions, elevated vantage points that eliminate the horizon, experimental techniques, or personal relationships with a specific landscape. Among the photographers featured are Virginia Beahan and Laura McPhee, Hai Bo, Susan Derges, and Richard Misrach.

September 2021

Yale’s Beinecke Library recently purchased a rare limited-edition portfolio entitled Iceland comprised of 15 vintage gelatin silver and chromogenic color contact prints made just after Virginia Beahan and Laura McPhee began their extensive collaboration in 1987.  The portfolio reveals the roots of their work and their early explorations of the concept of landscape in the process of developing a personal vision.

February 11 – May 7, 2017, Artist Gallery Talk: Thursday, March 30th

“Virginia Beahan’s photographs depict a complicated situation with directness and compassion without succumbing to sentimentality. They capture a painful transition every family faces, yet rarely reveals to the outside world. Portraying the end of her mother’s life with openness and generosity, Beahan’s images share her belief in the fundamental strengths that bind us together with those we love and hold dear.”

Toby Jurovics,

Chief Curator & Holland Curator of American Western Art

TIME Photo Department

Nov 23, 2016

“In this gallery, we spotlight TIME LightBox’s curation of the best photobooks of 2016 as chosen by photographers and photography experts from around the world and, of course, by our own editors. This is not meant to be a comprehensive list. Instead, these are the personal choices made with the agonizing rule of selecting just one.”

http://www.time.com/4580692/best-photobooks-2016/

July 25, 2015 – September 6, 2015, Artist Gallery Talk: 3:00 PM Saturday, August 29th

MCASD La Jolla, Meyer Gallery,
700 Prospect Street,
La Jolla, California
(858) 454-3541

“Virginia Beahan’s haunting photographs of the Salton Sea and its surrounds capture the lake’s layered history and precarious present. In Elegy for an Ancient Sea, Beahan presents images from her explorations of the California desert, as she brings a nuanced eye to the landscape’s fraught past. Through her visually sumptuous photographs, the Salton Sea becomes a kind of character, struggling to sustain life as its physical reality deteriorates.”

In Elegy for an Ancient Sea, Beahan examines the Salton Sea’s complexities as they manifest in the present. Some photographs focus on destruction: bare expanses of lakebed, dilapidated homes and trailer parks. Others record the persistence of life amid the ruins. Slab City, an abandoned military base, is now an off-the-grid community. Artists in the area are integrating their socially conscious work into remnants of what is left of the human-altered landscape. And new dreams of cities rising from the desert–disconcertingly similar to those that failed decades long ago–shimmer on the horizon. Underlying the photographs’ allure exist questions about the implications of human intervention into the natural world.

“There is a place in the California desert where a pipe pokes out from a berm made of broken concrete and delivers freshwater to a dying sea. I stood there recently, on a beach of crumbled barnacles, and watched it gush. The sea was the dull blue of a cataract, surrounded by small volcanoes, bubbling mud pots, and ragged, blank mountains used for bombing practice by the Navy and the Marines. The air smelled sweet and vaguely spoiled, like a dog that has got into something on a hot day. When the wind blew, it veiled the mountains in dust and sent puckered waves to meet the frothy white flow from the pipe. The sea, which is called the Salton Sea, is fifteen times bigger than the island of Manhattan and no deeper in most places than a swimming pool. Since 1924, it has been designated as an agricultural sump. In spite of being hyper-saline, and growing saltier all the time, the sea provides habitat to some four hundred and thirty species of birds, some of them endangered, and is one of the last significant wetlands remaining on the migratory path between Alaska and Central America.”

Letter from the Imperial Valley, May 4, 2015 Issue
The Dying Sea
What will California sacrifice to survive the drought?
By Dana Goodyear

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/letter-from-the-imperial-valley

“Our pilot, David Kunkel, asked me to retrieve his oxygen bottle from under my seat, and when I handed it to him he gripped the plastic breathing tube with his teeth and opened the valve. We had taken off from Boulder that morning, and were flying over Rocky Mountain National Park, about thirty miles to the northwest. We were in a Maule M-7, a single-engine “backcountry” plane, and Kunkel was navigating with the help of an iPad Mini, which was resting on his legs. “People don’t usually think altitude is affecting them,” he said. “But if you ask them to count backward from a hundred by sevens they have trouble.” What struck me at that moment was not how high we were but how low: a little earlier, we had flown within what seemed like hailing distance of the sheer east face of Longs Peak, and now, as Kunkel banked steeply to the right to give a better view of a stream at the bottom of a narrow valley, his wingtip appeared to pass just feet from the jagged declivity beneath. Snow had fallen in the mountains during the night, and I half expected it to swirl up in the plane’s wake.”

A Reporter at Large, May 25, 2015 Issue
Where the River Runs Dry
The Colorado and America’s water crisis
By David Owen

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/the-disappearing-river

Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College (April 4–August 23, 2015):

“Water is essential to human life, shaping the geography of human settlement, modes of travel, and ease of trade. Too much water (flooding) or too little (drought) has wrought havoc in communities for millennia. This exhibition considers humans’ relationship to water, …and showcases the beauty and power of this miraculous, yet quotidian, substance.”

Photographs by Virginia Beahan, Edward Burtynsky, Emmet Gowin and James Balog.