Work by New York based Photographer/Installation artist Richard Barnes has been shown in solo exhibitions at such institutions as the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the Carpenter Center at Harvard University, Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum, the University of Michigan Art Museum and the Parsons School of Design. His work can be found in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Barnes has lectured extensively, including at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, the School of Visual Arts in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He served as adjunct professor/visiting artist at the San Francisco Art Institute and has taught at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
In addition to his photographic work, Barnes often incorporates video into his Installations most notably on “State of Exception” in which he worked with the anthropologist Jason DeLeon and the curator Amanda Krugliak from the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities. This exhibition consisted of Deleon’s field work and featured the collected artifacts of itinerant migrants excavated along the border between Arizona and Mexico. The installation examined the precarious state of migrants crossing the border often losing everything at the hands of unscrupulous minders, or worse yet, dying in the the unforgiving Sonoran desert. This body of work traveled to five different venues across America and received numerous positive reviews in such publications as Hyperallergic and the New York Times arts section and the magazine. Barnes has created other installations which incorporate his photography and video work including, “Past Perfect/Present Tense” in 2009, “Animal Logic” at the Cranbrook Museum of Art, 2009 and “Object Lessons” 2017, also at the University of Michigan.
Barnes was a recipient of the Rome Prize 2005-2006 and his photographs of the cabin of Ted Kaczynski, aka the "Unabomber," were featured in the 2006 Whitney Biennial and awarded the Alfred Eisenstadt Award for Photography. He was the 2009 recipient of the Sidman Fellow for the Arts from the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan. In 2010 he completed a residency at Lightwork/Syracuse University. Most recently he finished a residency at the Kranich Museum in Hessenburg, Germany that resulted in the exhibition, Ubersehen/Overlook which opened in 2024 in Hessenburg.
A monograph of his work entitled Animal Logic, published in 2009, has received favorable reviews and was included in the American Institute of Graphic Arts juried competition/exhibition 50 books/50 covers in 2010. Veil (the Glass House) was published in 2014 and the book, Object Lessons, was published to accompany the exhibition of the same name in 2017.
Currently Barnes is working on a book and exhibition of work done in and around the quarries of northern Italy and the sculpture workshops at Carrara.