Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach

About the Exhibition

The enormous scope of Richard Misrach’s Desert Cantos series is unprecedented in the history of photography. For nearly two decades, Misrach has chronicled the American desert’s natural wonders as well as the changes that nature and humankind have wrought there. Ethereal images of clouds, rock formations, and desert seas are juxtaposed with sobering photographs of nuclear test sites, bomb craters, and desert fires.

Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach, organized by The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is the first major retrospective of this epic series. The exhibition features 73 large-scale photographs and 144 contact prints from Misrach's 18 cantos, or groups of photography. Organized in vertical stacks, the 8-by-10-inch contact prints provide a sampling of the great number of photographs in each canto. The photographs depict a tremendous variety of desert "events," including human-made floods and fires, world-record speed races, military activities, and mysterious animal burial pits.

The cantos weave a history of human "footprints" in the desert, ranging from horses to Winnebagos to space shuttles. Following its presentation at the MCA, the exhibition will travel to the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu (April 29-July 12, 1998). A 192-page catalogue, which includes more than 150 color plates, accompanies the exhibition. The Chicago presentation of Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach is made possible by Lannan Foundation. The exhibition was organized by The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. National funding was provided by the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.