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DIANE BURKO
The landscape painter Diane Burko has been a political activist since the 1970s, famous for creating Philadelphia FOCUS, a city-wide feminist arts festival of 1974, a major landmark of the national women's movement. But not until 2006 did she connect her art with her activism. Bringing her identity as an artist to the cause of climate change, she has collaborated with scientists to publicize the global crisis. Devoting her art to this cause, she has mobilized art's unique power to awaken our senses to the peril we face.
Climate change is destabilizing the earth's self-regulating systems and now threatens life as we know it. Fossil- fuel burning, deforestation, and other human industries have pumped greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, dramatically accelerating global warming. The heated atmosphere causes glaciers to melt; glacial melting makes sea levels rise. As oceans absorb more heat, they are becoming warmer, precipitating the death of coral reefs and more glacial melting. Meteorological change across the planet has brought unprecedented high temperatures, wildfires, floods, droughts, famines, and the quickened spread of infectious disease. All these are dangerously accelerating this year.
The paintings that open the exhibition announce its three themes: glacial melt, coral reef destruction, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Burko has long been interested in maps and cartography, as diagrams of geography and as armatures for visual expression. She created the "World Map Series" as a way to make the global reach of geological change palpable. Here, color is not used to designate nations or altitudes, but to speak directly to the emotions. |