Exhibit ‘In My Back Yard’

Healdsburg artist Pat Lenz, with her art piece “Nobody’s Poodle”, helped to put together the photography exhibit “IMBY – In My Backyard, Sonoma County Museum as Subject” at the Sonoma County Museum. (BETH SCHLANKER/ The Press Democrat

You’ve heard of NIMBYs. Those are the folks who show up at public hearings to say they really don’t oppose the construction of the latest big facility of some sort, as long as it’s “not in my backyard.”

Now it’s time for the “IMBYs.”

“In My Back Yard” is a concept promoted by Healdsburg artist and hotel, winery and gallery owner Pat Lenz. What it means is that photographers have taken pictures of arts display spaces, such as galleries and museums, from all angles, providing a whole different view of the space itself.

The first “IMBY” exhibit went up last summer at Lenz’s Slaughterhouse Space art gallery, housed in a converted slaughterhouse at Duchamp Winery. Lenz and her husband, Peter, are the founders and owners of both the winery and the Duchamp Hotel in Healdsburg.

Oakland artist Robin Lasser, right, and Sonoma County Museum Curator of History, Eric Stanley, carry in a piece of her artwork for the photography exhibit “IMBY – In My Backyard, Sonoma County Museum as Subject” at the Sonoma County Museum. (BETH SCHLANKER/ The Press Democrat)

A new and much larger exhibit — “IMBY — In My Backyard: The Sonoma County Museum as Subject” — opens Jan. 25 at the museum in Santa Rosa, featuring hundreds of photos by roughly 100 photographers, probing the building’s details and hidden spaces.

“I wanted to bring the IMBY concept to the museum, to open up the museum top to bottom, back to front, inside and out,” Lenz said.

Diane Evans, the Sonoma County Museum’s executive director, had invited Lenz to come up with an exhibit to fill an empty spot in the museum’s schedule for the beginning of the new year, and Lenz proposed a bigger and more ambitious sequel to her Slaughterhouse “IMBY” show.