Diane Burko

Off Faga'alu Coast, January 6, 2018, 2018
Archival pigment print
15 x 15"
Edition 1 of 3

Courtesy of Cristin Tierney Gallery

Artist Statement
After focusing for several decades on monumental geological formations and waterways through landscape painting, Burko has shifted in the past 20 years to analyze the impact of industrial and colonial activity on those same landscapes. Burko's practice seeks to visually emulsify interconnected subjects- extraction, deforestation, environmental justice, indigenous genocide, ecological degradation- so the connection between them becomes impossible to ignore. While her work deals with impending climate catastrophe, rather than lingering in dystopia, it celebrates the sublimity of the landscape by honoring the intricate geological and political webs that shape the identity of a place. Her current body of work uses large-scale mixed media painting to examine climate issues impacting the Amazon Rainforest.

Artist Bio
Diane Burko (b. 1945, Brooklyn) is an American artist based in Philadelphia whose practice is situated at the intersection of art, science, and the environment. Burko has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally, including shows at the Royal Academy of Art in London, Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, Minneapolis Art Institute, National Academy of Sciences, Phillips Collection, Palmer Museum of Art, RISD Museum of Art, Tang Museum, Wesleyan University Center for the Arts. She has been awarded residencies in Giverny, Bellagio, the Arctic Circle, the Amazon Rainforest and the Atlantic Rainforest. In 2021, her solo exhibition Seeing Climate Change at the American University Museum was cited in the New York Times as one of the best shows of 2021. Throughout her practice, Burko especially cherishes her collaborations with researchers in the sciences. She learns the most from "bearing witness" to the land.

Vincent D. Feldman
Convention Hall, Philadelphia, 2005
Archival pigment print from a large format film negative
21 x 32"
20/20

Provenance: Print was framed by the Philadelphia Atheneum for the exhibition City Abandoned: Selected Photographs by Vincent D. Feldman, September 11 - October 31, 2015

Artist Statement
The photograph of the demolition of Convention Hall is from the series City Abandoned, Charting the Loss of Civic Institutions in Philadelphia. This photograph appears in a double page spread on pages 107-108 in the 2014 award winning monograph book by the photographer.

Artist Bio
Vincent D. Feldman has photographed architecture and the urban landscape for nearly three decades. After receiving his B. A. from George Washington University in 1989, he spent several months visiting and photographing youth squatter communities throughout Europe. These autonomous movements have been redeveloping abandon government, military and industrial sites across Europe since the 1960's. As examples of urban historic preservation and culture building executed with little or no funds they left a lasting impression on Feldman.

When he returned to Philadelphia in 1991 his experiences in Europe began to help magnify and focus his insights on architectural subject matter, particularly the myriad issues that can confront historic buildings. The codes and questions, the particulars of design and adaptations, the marks of success and failure in both public and private architecture, are some of the principal motifs found in Feldman's body of work.

From 1993 to 2006 Feldman worked extensively on his Philadelphia: City Abandoned portfolio. This photographic collection of cast off civic buildings and infrastructure is a personal journey and investigation into what had become of this once teaming metropolis. This detailed exploration of early to mid-modern society in Philadelphia, through the looking glass of it's architectural presence is also a parallel examination of this nations tragic decline of the Common Good.

Feldman's master's thesis at the Tyler School of Art (1997) represented his first compilation of this work in gelatin silver prints. In 2001 he was the recipient of a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. This grant was significant in aiding much of the location shooting and cataloging as well as also being critical in providing the resources to make high quality digital prints culled from nearly two thousand 4 x 5 inch negatives. City Abandoned: Charting the Loss of Civic Institutions in Philadelphia, was published by Paul Dry Books in the Fall of 2013 and contains over 90 duotone plates and 60 pages of text.

Feldman lives and works in Philadelphia. His work is in the collections of the The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Allentown Art Museum, the Free Library of Philadelphia, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Zeit-Foto Salon, KOWA, Tokyo as well as in numerous private collections.