Blazing Light is published to coincide with Mimi Plumb's first solo museum exhibition of the same name (High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia) and brings together three of her major bodies of work--The White Sky, Landfall and The Golden City, and The Reservoir--that collectively contemplate the anxieties of American life in the waning years of the Cold War and its aftermath.
In the 1970s, Plumb began photographing as a teenager in the San Francisco suburb of Walnut Creek at a time marked by rapid development of the land coupled with global political and economic instability. Her early artistic life was defined by a burgeoning awareness of global warming, the AIDS epidemic, violent conflict in Latin America and the Middle East, and a looming threat of nuclear war. This atmosphere attuned Plumb 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 to this day.
Plumb's photographs foreground the presence of people, lending her images a greater degree of pathos and even notes of humorous absurdity. Though the artist embraces realism, her photographs are more ambient and enigmatic, inviting conjecture rather than providing documentary information. The publication will include texts by Gregory Harris, curator of the exhibition; Karen Irvine, chief curator and deputy director at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; and Lauren Richman, curator of photography at the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL.
Plumb's work is held in numerous public collections, including the High Museum of Art (GA), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), Museum of Fine Arts Boston (MA), Yale University Art Gallery (CT), and the Deutsche B�rse Collection (Germany).
The Mimi Plumb: Blazing Light exhibition will be on view at the High Museum of Art from February 6-May 5, 2026. The exhibition will then travel to the Johnson Museum at Cornell University, NY (summer 2026), the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, FL (winter 2026/2027), followed by the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, IL (spring 2027).
Based in Berkeley, CA, Mimi Plumb (b. 1953) has photographed the human-altered landscape of California and the western United States with an eye toward the effects of climate change, unbridled capitalism, and looming military conflict since the 1970s. She earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute and taught at the Art Institute of Chicago, Stanford University, and San Jose State University. She is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2017 recipient of the John Gutmann Award, and a 1989/1990 California Arts Council Artist Fellow. Plumb's photographs have been exhibited at the MFA Boston, Light Work in Syracuse, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, and Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco.
Gregory J. Harris is the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family Curator of Photography. He is a specialist in contemporary photography with a particular interest in documentary practice.
Karen Irvine is currently the Chief Curator and Deputy Director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College, Chicago.
Lauren Richman is the William and Sarah Ross Soter Curator of Photography at the Norton Simon Museum (Palm Beach, FL).
