Diane Burko

Diane Burko’s work in painting, photography, and time-based media considers the marks that human conversations make on the landscape. Burko has received multiple grants from the NEA, the Pennsylvania Arts Council, the Leeway Foundation, and the Independence Foundation. She has received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art.

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. The artist’s practice seeks to visually emulsify interconnected subjects—extraction, deforestation, extinction, environmental justice, Indigenous genocide, ecological degradation, and climate collapse—so viewers might feel their connection viscerally through the beauty of her work. 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.

Burko has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally, including shows at London’s Royal Academy of Art, Madrid's Círculo de Bellas Artes, Minneapolis Art Institute, National Academy of Sciences, Phillips Collection, RISD Museum, Tang Museum, and Wesleyan University Center for the Arts. She has been awarded residencies in Giverny, Bellagio, the Arctic Circle, and the Amazon 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. In 2025, her solo show at Cristin Tierney Gallery, Diane Burko: Bearing Witness, was her long-awaited return to New York—her first solo show there in over 40 years.

Throughout her practice, Burko especially cherishes her collaborations with researchers in the sciences. She learns the most from "bearing witness" to the land.

Submitted by Cristin Tierney