Diane Burko

Diane Burko
Born	1945 (1945)
Nationality	American
Field	Painting, Photography
Training	Skidmore College; Graduate School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania

Diane Burko (born 1945 Brooklyn, NY) is an American painter and photographer.

For over 40 years Diane Burko’s practice has focused on monumental and geological phenomena throughout the world based on her ability to investigate actual locations on the ground and from the air from open-door Helicopters and Cessnas with cameras as well as sketchpads. Her paintings are derived from that process. Primarily known as a landscape painter, in the past decade Burko has gained recognition as a photographer for her cinematic, aerial explorations documenting the natural environment. Her focus has been alternatively panoramic and intimate. Not only has she captured broad expanses of the Pacific Northwest and the volcanoes of Italy, she has also developed a more intimate focus on her own environment in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Her most recent archival inkjet prints of Glacier National Park in Montana, as well as those from waterways in Bucks County, will be exhibited at the Locks Gallery in Philadelphia in the summer of 2011.

Biography

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1945, Burko graduated from Skidmore College in 1966 where she received her B.S. in art history and painting. She continued her study of painting earning an M.F.A. in 1969 from the Graduate School of Fine Arts of the University of Pennsylvania and continues to live and work in Philadelphia and Bucks County. After graduating, Burko went on to become professor emeritus of the Community College of Philadelphia where she taught from 1969-2000. During her time at CCP, Burko founded the transfer art program. Throughout her career, Burko has taught at various schools across the country such as Princeton University, Arizona State University and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

In 1976, Ivan Karp offered Burko a “Dealer’s Showcase” at OK Harris Gallery in New York, NY, which attracted the attention of critic David Bourdon, who reviewed her solo exhibition in The Village Voice.^[1] The following year, while flying with Light and Space artist James Turrell in his Helio Courier over the Grand Canyon, Burko captured her first aerial photographs of the landscape. Since 1977, she has produced thousands of photographs, many of which have served as source material for her landscape paintings.

In 1989, the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund awarded Burko a grant to fund a six-month residency in Giverny, France. The paintings which resulted from this residency met with positive reviews in the United States. The Washington Post praised Burko's "distinctive approach to composition."^[2] While in France, Burko and painter Joan Mitchell visited one another's studios.

In 1993 Burko was awarded a residency at the Rockefeller Study and Conference Center in Bellagio where she painted en plein air for five weeks. This culminated in her 1994 Locks Gallery exhibition, “Luci ed Ombra di Bellagio" - "The Light and Shadow of Bellagio.” Robert Rosenblum, who first took an interest in Burko's work in 1976, wrote the accompanying catalog essay.^[3] Other critics and curators who have written about Burko's work include: Lawrence Alloway, Roberta Fallon,^[4] Pat Hogan,^[5] Leslie Kaufman,^[6] Cate McQuaid,^[7] Preston McLane, Edith Newhall,^[8][9][10] John Perreault, Carter Ratcliff,^[11] Libby Rosof,^[12] Julie Sasse, Amy Schlegel, Ed Sozanski,^[13][14][15] and Michael Tomor. In 1996 Burko won a $200,000 Public Art commission sponsored by the RDA of Philadelphia and the Marriott Hotel.^[16] Burko's artwork appears on The Fairmount Park Art Association Public Art Tour in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Work

Burko’s widely exhibited works are in numerous private and public collections including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Delaware Art Museum, the James A. Michener Art Museum, the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Woodmere Art Museum. Diane Burko has been represented by Locks Gallery since 1976, during which time she has had over thirty solo exhibitions in galleries and museums across the U.S.

In February 2006, Amy Schlegel, the Director of Galleries at Tufts University organized a show titled: "FLOW"^[17] which featured Burko’s volcanic and Icelandic paintings as well as a selection of her photographs. This show traveled to the Michener Museum from June to October 2006.

Climate Change

Since 2000 Burko has studied volcanic tectonics and glacial geology, as well as climate change, which have led to her current imagery. For the last five years, she has been developing Politics of Snow ,^[18][19] a project investigating the historical comparisons of global climate change through images culled from glacial geological data recorded throughout the world. The intentions of her practice have changed so that she is no longer just interested in interacting with a particular site in real time, but rather in confronting issues of geological/chronological time - past, present, and future.

With the Politics of Snow II series, on display at the Bernstein Gallery at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, Burko focuses on historical time, rather than cyclical or continuous natural processes. These paintings of glaciers under erasure depict particular glaciers in Peru, Montana, and Alaska, photographically-monitored by scientists for a century. No longer dependent on her own photos, Burko employs photo-documents shot by scientists and field researchers at U.S. Geological Survey and Byrd Polar Research Center at The Ohio State University, such as David Arnold, Henry Brecher, Dan Fagre, Ulysses S. Grant IV, Karen Holzer, Carl Key, Bruce Molnia, Sidney Paige, Tad Pfeffer, Lonnie Thompson and Bradford Washburn, or images stored in the Glacier National Park archives. Regarding this series, Curator Ian Berry remarks how “Burko combines traditional landscape painting with an activist edge that has simmered underneath the surface of her previous paintings but now boldly surfaces.”^[20]

Finally, the serial nature of Burko’s investigations into the changing appearance of specific glaciers (e.g., by juxtaposing different historical views from the same vantage point but at slightly different scaled canvases) foregrounds her painterly interest in both spatial and temporal transformation. Judith E. Stein observes, “To my horror, I found myself adding my own mental image to each sequence, extrapolating from what [Burko] shows, thereby envisioning the next, un-depicted step in the warming process— our dystopic future.”^[21]

Awards

Diane Burko has received many awards including two NEA Visual Arts Fellowships (1985, 1991);^[22] two Individual Artists Grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts (1981, 1989);^[23] a Lila Acheson Wallace Foundation Residence Fellowship (1989);^[24] a Rockefeller Foundation Residence Fellowship (1993);^[25] and the Bessie Berman $50,000 Grant, awarded by the Leeway Foundation in Philadelphia (2000).^[26]

In 1996 Burko won a $200,000 Public Art commission sponsored by the RDA of Philadelphia and the Marriott Hotel.^[27] The result was a three year project: Wissahickon Reflections,^[28] which comprises over 1,400 square feet (130 m²) of paintings, with one single panel measuring 11.5 feet (3.5 m) by 32 feet (9.8 m).

Throughout her career as an artist, Burko has been an active member in the Feminist Art movement. In 1974 she founded the all city festival: Focus: Philadelphia Focus on Women in the Visual Arts - Past and Present. She was just awarded the WCA/CAA Lifetime Achievement Award^[29][30] in February, 2011.

References

1. ^ Bourdon, David, “There’s a New Kid or Two in Town,” Village Voice, June 1977
2. ^ Wilson, Janet, “Diane Burko’s Lasting Impressions,” The Washington Post, July 6, 1991, Illust.
3. ^ Diane Burko, Luci ed Ombra di Bellagio - The Light and Shadow of Bellagio, Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, PA, Essay: Robert Rosenblum, 1994
4. ^ Fallon, Roberta, "Planet Rock ," Philadelphia Weekly , March 22–28, 2006, illust.
5. ^ Hogan, Pat, "Climate Control," The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 5, 2006
6. ^ Kaufman, Leslie; "Women's Art Is Never Done", Inside, Fall 2006, illust.
7. ^ McQuaid, Cate, "Touching the Void," The Boston Globe, March 19, 2006, illust.
8. ^ Newhall, Edith, "Galleries: Paintings depicting the effects of global warming," Phladelphia Inquirer, February 28, 2010
9. ^ Newhall, Edith, "Painter a natural photographer," The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 16, 2006, Illust.
10. ^ Newhall, Edith, "Looking Skyward for a Peak," March 17, 2006
11. ^ Ratcliff, Carter, "Diane Burko: The Volcano Series," Woman's Art Journal, Fall 2002 / Winter 2003.
12. ^ Rosof, Libby, "Burko and Apfelbaum-power women at Locks", The artblog, February 18, 2010
13. ^ Sozanski, Ed, "Painters and watery inspiration", The Philadelphia Inquirer: Arts and Entertainment, July 6, 2008
14. ^ Sozanski, Edward J., "New Directions and Some New Artists," The Philadelphia Inquirer, Friday, October 20, 2000, Illust.
15. ^ Sozanski, Edward J., “Diane Burko at Marian Locks,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 7, 1988, Illust.
16. ^ “One Percent” Public Art Commission awarded by the Redevelopment Authority of Philadelphia, Marriott Hotel, Philadelphia, 1996.
17. ^ http://ase.tufts.edu/gallery/shows/images/burko.pdf
18. ^ http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/02/burko-climate-change-politics-snow-locks.php
19. ^ http://www.broadstreetreview.com/index.php/main/article/diane_burkos_politics_of_snow_at_locks_gallery/%E2%80%9CLondon
20. ^ Ian Berry, “Melt: New Paintings by Diane Burko.” Politics of Snow Philadelphia. Locks Gallery. 2010. pp. 4-15.
21. ^ Judith Stein. “A Change of Temperature on Canvas.” Broad Street Review. February 16, 2010.
22. ^ National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship, 1991-92, 1985-86
23. ^ Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Individual Artists Grant, 1989, 1981
24. ^ Residence Fellowship at Giverny, Readers Digest Foundation, April – September 1989.
25. ^ Residence Fellowship at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center, The Rockefeller Foundation, September 1993.
26. ^ Bessie Berman Grant in Painting, The Leeway Foundation, 2000.
27. ^ “One Percent” Public Art Commission awarded by the Redevelopment Authority of Philadelphia, Marriott Hotel, Philadelphia, 1996.
28. ^ http://www.phila.gov/rda/RDAonepercentforart.htm
29. ^ http://www.nationalwca.org/awards/currentLAA.php
30. ^ http://www.citypaper.net/blogs/criticalmass/philly_artists_diane_burkos_lifetime_achievement.html

External links

• www.dianeburko.com
• www.locksgallery.com

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Name	Burko, Diane
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Date of birth	dt=1945
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