Image: Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach
‘Blazing Light: Photographs by Mimi Plumb’ is organized by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. The exhibition runs from October 31, 2026, through March 14, 2027.
Plumb’s first museum exhibition brings together three major bodies of work that collectively contemplate the anxieties of contemporary American culture through the combined effects of climate change, unbridled capitalism and ceaseless military conflict.
Plumb began photographing as a teenager in the 1970s, during a period of rapid land development coupled with global political and economic instability. Her early artistic life was defined by a growing awareness of global warming and the looming threats posed by the Cold War.
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. Her gritty black-and-white images render California’s notoriously intense sunlight to amplify the psychological tension and imaginative possibilities that define turbulent times.
The exhibition’s three bodies of work are ‘The White Sky’ (1972–1978), ‘Landfall and The Golden City’ (1984–2020), and ‘The Reservoir’ (2021–2025). ‘The White Sky’ 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’ presents a society descending into chaos as an ambiguous disaster looms; and ‘The Reservoir’ conveys a stark and desolate world seemingly in the aftermath of a powerful, undefined apocalypse. Works highlighted on the exhibition page include ‘Boys and Tires, Sears Point’ (1976), ‘Crowd and Fire’ (1976), and ‘Salton Sea’ (1984).
