About the Exhibition

WORKS
46 photographs; 1 painting

DIMENSIONS
See checklist below.

SPACE REQUIREMENTS
___ linear feet (___ linear meters)

INQUIRIES
exhibitions@curatorial.org | 626.577.0044

FEE
Please inquire.

Ansel Adams: Mountain, Water, Cloud, and Sea invites audiences into a sweeping visual journey across the American landscape, tracing the evolution of one of the 20th century’s most iconic photographers. Featuring 47 masterworks spanning the 1920s through the 1960s, the exhibition reveals Adams’s enduring fascination with the grandeur of Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada, alongside rare and compelling images from his travels in Alaska and New Mexico. Beyond these celebrated vistas, visitors encounter unexpected, quietly unsettling scenes—stark depictions of a solitary church, a unsettling symmetrical barn in Cape Cod, and a distant Mormon temple separated by a gate in the foreground—that hint at a more austere and introspective vision. 

Organized in partnership with The Virginia Adams Mayhew Collection and the Ansel Adams Publishing Trust, and with works selected in close collaboration with Adam's granddaughter, the exhibition offers a deeply personal perspective on Adams’s legacy. It also includes a rare historical dialogue: a pre-1936 painting of Yosemite Valley by Harry Best from the Virginia Mayhew Collection, alongside a vibrant Cibachrome print of Monument Valley that reveals a bold and lesser-seen exploration of color in Adams’s work. Together, these works illuminate both the mythic beauty and the subtle complexities of the American landscape through Adams’s uncompromising lens.