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Scientific American: Bearing Witness to Climate Change

Glacial Shifts, Changing Perspectives Bearing Witness to Climate Change

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Diane Burko

Release date: Spring 2017
Writer & Photography: Diane Burko
Essays:
Carter Ratcliff
William L. Fox
Andrea Packard
Pages: 76 | Hardcover
Images: 90 color
Size: 10.5 in x 9 in
ISBN: 9780998456409

Categories: , ,

This exquisitely designed book documents an exhibition organized by Arkansas’s Walton Arts Center in conjunction with Artosphere, an annual regional festival that celebrates artists influenced by nature.

The 40 pieces reproduced in this book are recent projects inspired by expeditions to the polar regions. In addition, it contains an introduction by the Walton Art’s Center curator Andrea Packard; an analysis of Burko’s work in relation to the history of glacial imagery, written by William Fox, the Director of the Art and Environment Center of the Nevada Museum of Art; and insightful commentary by Carter Ratcliff who followed the artist’s career as it developed over many years. He highlights her most recent project, The Elegy Series, which is featured on both the front and back covers.

About the Author

Diane Burko has placed herself at the intersection of science and art, imparting imaginative and emotional dimensions to the statistics on climate change. An exhibition (May 5-September 30, 2017) at the Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville AR featuring work from the past decade, will be accompanied by this exquisite book, reproducing 40 photographs, prints, and paintings — urgent reminders of the vanishing beauty and peril of a warming planet. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration just announced 2016 was the warmest year on record.

Since the 1970s Burko’s work has evolved from photographing and painting monumental landscapes to documenting glacial recession, using the power of art to capture its reality. Joining expeditions in Svalbard, Norway, Argentina, Greenland, and Antarctica, she has seen firsthand the rapid transformation of landscapes essential to life on earth. Her creative response, represented in these pages, compels us to take notice and take action. This book is comprised of both her photography and painting.

Contributors

Carter Ratcliff

Carter Ratcliff is a poet and critic. His gallery reviews and writing have appeared in notable art periodicals and catalogues including Artnews, Art in America, and Artforum, His many books include John Singer Sargent (Abbeville Press, 1982); Robert Longo (Rizzoli, 1985); The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and PostwarAmerican Art (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996); Andy Warhol: Portraits (Phaidon Press, 2007); Out of the Box: The Reinvention of Art, 1965-1975, (Allworth Press, 2001); and Georgia O’Keeffe, (Kunstshaus Zürich, 2003). In 1976, he was an awarded a Guggenheim fellow-ship in fine arts research.

William L. Fox

William L. Fox serves as the Director of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno. He has published fifteen collections of poetry and eleven nonfiction books about the relationships among art, cognition, and landscape. In 2001-02 he spent two-and-a-half months in the Antarctic with the National Science Foundation in the Antarctic Visiting Artists and Writers Program. He has also worked as a team member of the NASA Haughton-Mars Project, and has been a visiting scholar at the Lannan Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, the Clark Institute, the Australian National University, and the National Museum of Australia.

Andrea Packard

Andrea Packard has directed the List Gallery at Swarthmore College since 1995 and served as curator for Walton Arts Center 2009–2016. The author of more than 25 exhibition catalog essays, she has written about diverse artists including Buzz Spector, José Bedia, William Daley, Allison Saar, and Lois Dodd. She has exhibited her own mixed media works in over fifty exhibitions nationally.

Andrea Packard is the exhibition curator and editor of Glacial Shifts, Changing Perspectives.

Read More About This Book

This exquisitely designed book documents an exhibition organized by Arkansas’s Walton Arts Center in conjunction with Artosphere, an annual regional festival (May 4 – September 30, 2017) that celebrates artists influenced by nature.

During the last decade, Philadelphia based artist Diane Burko has been documenting the disappearance of glaciers in large-scale series of paintings and photographs developed in close collaboration with glaciologists. In this symbiotic relationship, the artist wants her work to accurately reflect the science and the urgency of climate change, and the scientists want the artist’s help in communicating their findings to the public.

“It was no longer just about painting beautiful landscapes, but it was about figuring out a way to talk through my language of paint about this most urgent issue for our time, and for the future.” Burko asserts in an interview with Benjamin Orlove, Director, Graduate Program in Climate and Society, Columbia University:

The 40 pieces reproduced in this book are recent projects inspired by expeditions to the polar regions. In addition, it contains an introduction by the Walton Art’s Center curator Andrea Packard; an analysis of Burko’s work in relation to the history of glacial imagery, written by William Fox, the Director of the Art and Environment Center of the Nevada Museum of Art; and insightful commentary by Carter Ratcliff who followed the artist’s career as it developed over many years. He highlights her most recent project, The Elegy Series, which is featured on both the front and back covers, saying that:

In her view, they are not abstract but referential— reflections of concerns she has been feeling with increasing intensity for nearly a decade…. With these new works…Burko heightens our awareness of the world’s deepening predicament. And as she presents the facts about climate change, they don’t merely accumulate. Embraced by the artist’s imagination and ours, they amplify one another. They take on the luminous urgency of truth.

Press

Philadelphia Inquirer

After years of documenting disappearing glaciers, Diane Burko shifts to barrier reefs

Diane Burko never intended to be a climate-change activist.

But in 2006, while speaking at the James A. Michener Art Museum — where her 1976 painting of the French Alps was displayed — she had a eureka moment.
Read more at philly.com

Democrat Gazette

5×5 Five Minutes, Five Questions: Artist Diane Burko

Artist Diane Burko’s work, focused on the effects on climate change on glaciers, blends her hopeful spirit with subtle scientific messages about these remote regions of the world. Her exhibition “Glacial Shifts, Changing Perspectives” is open at the Joy Pratt Markham Gallery inside the Walton Arts Center for the Artosphere festival and will be on display through September. Burko answered these questions for What’s Up! just before the opening of her exhibition.
Read more on Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette online

World Policy Institute BLOG

Bearing Witness to Climate Change

I am an artist devoted to communicating issues of climate change through my practice. For the past decade, I’ve been documenting the dramatic disappearance of glaciers in large-scale series of paintings and photographs developed in close collaboration with glaciologists. It’s a symbiotic relationship: I want my work to accurately reflect the science and the urgency of climate change, and they want me to help them explain their science to the public through my art.
Read more on the World Policy Institute BLOG

KUAF – National Public Radio

Diane Burko: Glacial Art, and Warning, From Above

Interview by Kyle Kellams

Diane Burko’s art includes images of glaciers from above. The exhibition of her work at Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville includes images from years apart to show effects of glacial change.

Listen on NPR’s kuaf.com

Scientific American

Diane Burko: Bearing Witness to Climate Change

A new exhibition and book document an artist’s 10-year exploration of vanishing glacial landscapes though paintings and photographs

I am an artist devoted to communicating issues of climate change through my practice. For the past decade, I’ve been documenting the dramatic disappearance of glaciers in large-scale series of paintings and photographs developed in close collaboration with glaciologists. It’s a symbiotic relationship: I want my work to accurately reflect the science and the urgency of climate change, and they want me to help them explain their science to the public through my art.

Read more on Scientific American online