A preeminent artist of her generation, Mimi Plumb has photographed the human-altered landscape for five decades to conjure the enduring issues of our day. Blazing Light, the artist’s first museum exhibition, brings together her three most important bodies of work that collectively contemplate the anxieties of contemporary American culture: the combined effects of climate change, unbridled capitalism, and ceaseless military conflict. As a teenager in the 1970s, Plumb began photographing during a time of rapid land development coupled with global political and economic instability. Her early artistic life was defined by a burgeoning awareness of global warming and the looming threats posed by the Cold War. This atmosphere attuned her to the evidence of such forces in the land, the built environment, and the ways people carry themselves and relate to one another—concerns that continue to abide in her work.
Working in and around San Francisco, Plumb photographs the grand yet fragile beauty of the American West and the peculiarities of urban life with a distinctively raw visual approach. She skillfully renders California’s notoriously intense sunlight in gritty black-and-white images to amplify the psychological tension and imaginative possibilities that define turbulent times. The White Sky (1972–1978) captures the final glimmers of innocence and optimism during the years following World War II, as cracks in the façade of the American Dream began to widen. Landfall and The Golden City (1984–2020) present a society descending into chaos as an ambiguous disaster looms. The Reservoir (2021–2025) conveys a stark and desolate world seemingly in the aftermath of a powerful, undefined apocalypse. Across these bodies of work, Plumb mournfully charts how persistent unease continues to manifest from the dark realms of imagination into pressing realities.
