Inferno

Text by Charles Bowden. Photographs by Michael P. Berman. Inferno burns with Charles Bowden’s passion for the desert he calls home. ‘I want to eat the dirt and lick the rock. Or leave the shade for the sun and feel the burning. I know I don’t belong here. But this is the only place I belong,” he says. His vivid description, complemented by Michael Berman’s acutely observed photographs, make readers feel the heat and smell the dryness, see the colors in earth and sky, and hear the singing of dry bones across the parched ground.

Grasslands

This catalog documents a two-part exhibition that has sprung from the work of Michael P. Berman, a former Guggenheim Fellow, who is both esteemed in the contemporary art world and a longtime activist with several environmental organizations.

Berman’s series of photographs titled Grasslands, is about the endangered Chihuahuan Desert grasslands in New Mexico, Texas and the Northern border of Mexico, where he has wandered into the desert without a compass to, in his words, “live deliberately.” He believes that how you see the land comes down to what you value. “I believe art has a greater potential for meaning when it serves some purpose. People have started to recognize these lands as significant and this is something art can help along. If anything my work is to generate small symbols that reveal the greater complexity of things.”

Inspired by his Grasslands series guest curator Mary Anne Redding has assembled a concurrent exhibition, Separating Species that includes a remarkable group of artists, all of whom delve into land in diverse ways that illuminate our relationship to our fragile ecosystems, highlighting our interconnectedness with the environment and non-human species. Krista Elrick examines North American birds; Dana Fritz looks at plants and animals in engineered indoor landscape environments; Jo Whaley creates theatrical still life images of insects and humans; and David Taylor’s images of border monuments along the US/Mexico border explore the effect of border control on both humans and animals.

480 Plates: Photographs by Michael P. Berman

When installed, Michael P. Berman’s 480 Plates resembles a massive mosaic of black, white, and all the shades of gray in between. Individually, the plates have something of a ratable feeling, the small devotional paintings on metal or wood found in the Mexican and other Latin American folk culture. The plates or “offerings,” capture both minute details and the monumental vastness of the desert Southwest: sand dune tracks, cactus needles, cragged rock and hundred mile vistas. Conversely, if one stands back and relaxes one’s focus, abstract patterns emerge: diagonals, curves, lines and forms.

Lannan foundation is pleased to publish this catalogue commemorating Berman’s ode to the desert that stretches between the U.S. and Mexico, ignoring its borders as nature always does.

Trinity

Sparing no one, Charles Bowden recounts how everyone who has laid claim to the Southwestern desert—Native Americans, Spain, Mexico, and the United States—has attempted to control and domesticate this ecologically fragile region, often with devastating consequences. He reserves special scorn for the U.S. government, whose attempts at control have provoked consequences ranging from the massive land grab of the Mexican War in the nineteenth century, to the nuclear fallout of the first atomic bomb test in the twentieth century, to the police state that is currently growing up around attempts to seal the border and fight terrorism. Providing a stunning visual counterpoint to Bowden's words, Michael Berman's photographs of the desert reveal both its harsh beauty and the scars it bears after centuries of human abuse.

Bowden's clearest warning yet about the perils facing the desert he calls home, Trinity confirms that, in his words, "the [border] zone is a laboratory where the delusions of life—economic, religious, military, foreign policy, biological, and agricultural—can be tested. This time the edge is the center, this time the edge is the face of the future."

Gila

Edited and with a Foreword by Mary Anne Redding Vol 1: Radical Visions: Essays by Sharman Apt Russell, Charles Bowden, Phillip Connors, Dave Foreman, Jorge Garcia, John Horning, Rex Johnson, Victor Masayesva Jr, Guy McPherson, Alejandro (Alex) G. Munoz Jr, Mary Katherine Ray, M. H. Salmon, Martha Schumann, and Patrick Toomay. Vol 2: The Enduring Silence: Photographs by Michael P. Berman designed by David Skolkin Often referenced but seldom visited, the Gila is one of the most important and least photographed landscapes in the American west. Noted environmentalist Aldo Leopold conceived the modern concept of “Wilderness” here. It was the Gila that he learned the significance of water and fire, predators and prey, and the marvels of large untrammeled landscapes. This is a place that still teaches us to see the land as a complex living system.

Perdido: Sierra San Luis

By Michael P. Berman, Foreward by Tim DeChristopher, Essay by Rodrigo Sierra Corona, Afterword by Valer Clark. “No estoy perdido. I am not lost. I like this country. I am happy here, and I feel safe… The border throws you off, but it also wakes you up. I was not always this comfortable here, and it is a bit of a story how I fell in love with Sierra San Luis. It starts with the day I saw the last Mexican wolf on American soil— not one of the reintroduced ones with leather dog-collar trackers strapped around their necks, but a wild one up from Sonora or maybe Durango— and it ended when an old Mexican rancher, the man who killed the same wolf, opened a locked gate for me and let me in.” -Michael P. Berman. The remarkable Sierra San Luis forms the nexus of the Sierra Madres and Rocky Mountains. Berman wandered the Mexican borderlands occupied by Ranchers, wildlife and narcos. His documentation — photographs and words— explores the meaning of the beautiful and rugged landscape and provides a poetic understanding of how one learns to see the land. As Berman notes, the ecological systems on the planet are failing, yet the Sierra San Luis collapse has reversed itself- water, soil, and ecological diversity- are all increasing in quantity and improving in quality. Why here and nowhere else?