Terri Warpinski
Death|s|trip
Mar 5 - 28 , 2026
Death|s|trip is a long-term documentary project that restores memory to sites in present day Berlin where victims of the Berlin Wall lost their lives.
Here, the landscape serves as a stage or screen. Each of the sites photographed within contemporary Berlin links directly to a victim of the Berlin Wall – to an individual who died in a desperate attempt to flee oppression between 1961 – 1989. In August of 1961 the city was transformed overnight to eliminate free movement between East and West Berlin as the Cold War escalated political and economic differences, then in 1989 a grass roots movement just as suddenly forced a dramatic change that led to reunification.
Death|s|trip tells the stories of dreams and lives that were lost through written narratives derived from rigorous archive-based research commemorating the deaths of each of the individuals. These stories, etched on plexiglass, project over an historic map of the location depicted in the photograph, revealing both a larger context for the locale and a direct reference to site as it was at that time the event occurred.
Death|s|trip celebrates the lives and courage of the victims, drawing attention upon their absence, and, in some instances, the loss experienced by their loved ones. What Death|s|trip reveals is striking in its detail, heartbreaking in the failures depicted, and disturbing in the resemblance it bears to today, with too many men, women, and children continuing to risk everything, including their lives, to seek a life free of injustice and poverty.
In-Person Artist Talk
Sat, Mar 7 at 2 PM
Terri Warpinski (American, b. 1955, she/her) explores the complex relationship between personal, cultural and natural histories through her lens-based, mixed media creative practice. For over four decades her various projects have taken her throughout the American West and Mexico, Australia, Western and Central Europe, the Middle East and Iceland. She was distinguished as a Fulbright Senior Fellow to Israel in 2000-2001, as Professor Emerita of Art in 2016 after a 32-year career teaching at the University of Oregon, and was the Honored Educator of Society for Photographic Education in 2018. Most recently was awarded the Carol Crow Fellowship for Environmental Photography by the Houston Center for Photography in 2024, was a Top 50 finalist of Critical Mass and was a finalist exhibited in the international BBA Photography Prize exhibition in Berlin, Germany.
Her extensive exhibition record includes the Pingyao International Festival of Photography in China; the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem; Houston International Fotofest; the Center for Photography in Woodstock, New York; the University of the Arts in Philadelphia; and Camerawork in San Francisco. She was awarded a DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) Fellowship in 2017 to Berlin for work her long-term project Death|s|trip. Her limited-edition artist books (Sagebrush, 1999 and Surface Tension, 2016), and collaborative broadside portfolios (Liminal Matter: Fences, 2017 and Liminal Matter:Traces, 2018) with Portland poet Laura Winter are in numerous public and special collections including Stanford University; The Bancroft at UC-Berkeley; Beinecke Library, Yale; Book Arts Collection, Baylor University; Amherst College; and the Getty Research Institute. She is a member of the Environmental Photography Collective.
A native of Northeastern Wisconsin, she once again resides in that glacially carved landscape and ancestral home of the Ho-Chunk (Hoocąk) and Menominee (Kāēyās maceqtawak) Nations along the Fox River in De Pere with her husband, photographer David Graham.