Visiting Artist Lecture | Mimi Plumb

Over the last fifty years, photographer Mimi Plumb has expertly and poignantly captured the evolution of the Western U.S. landscape and the lives of those within it. In her first solo museum exhibition, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta will present three of her major bodies of work, featuring more than one hundred photographs captured in and around San Francisco and across the American West. Collectively, Blazing Light: Photographs by Mimi Plumb contemplates how changes in geopolitics, the economy and the environment have shaped the anxieties of American life from the 1970s to today.

After it debuts at the High, the exhibition will travel to three more venues: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University (Ithaca, N.Y.), the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago.

About the artist

Mimi Plumb is part of a long tradition of socially engaged photographers concerned with California and the West. She received a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship in support of her current project, The Reservoir.

Plumb’s latest book, Lookout on Highway 74, was recently published by Nazraeli Press. Her first book, Landfall, published by TBW Books in 2018, is a collection of her images from the 1980s, a dreamlike vision of an American dystopia encapsulating the anxieties of a world spinning out of balance. Landfall was shortlisted for the Paris Photo/Aperture Foundation First Photobook Award 2019, and the Lucie Photo Book Prize 2019. Her second book, The White Sky, a memoir of her childhood growing up in suburbia, photographed in the 1970s, was published by Stanley/Barker in September 2020. The Golden City, her third book, published by Stanley/Barker in March 2022, focuses on her many years living in San Francisco, with images from 1984 to 2000. In 2023, Stanley/Barker published Plumb’s fourth book, Megalith-Still, depicting a herd of horses living in the John Muir Wilderness of the High Sierra, photographed from 1995-2005.

In addition to her Guggenheim fellowship, Plumb is the recipient of the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship (2017), California Humanities grant (2015), California Arts Council Individual Artist Grant (1989), James D. Phelan Art Award in Photography (1986), and the Marin Arts Council Grant (1999).

Plumb will be the subject of a solo exhibition organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta in 2026. Her photographs are in the collection of the High Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Art Collection Deutsche Börse in Germany, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Pier 24, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery.

Plumb received her MFA in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1986, and her BFA in Photography from SFAI in 1976. She has served on the faculties of SFAI, San Jose State University, Stanford University, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently lives in Berkeley, California.