Diane Burko: Visualizing Climate Change

Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1945, Diane Burko graduated from Skidmore College in 1966, receiving a B.S. in art history and painting, and an M.F.A. in 1969 from the Graduate School of Fine Arts of the University of Pennsylvania. She has lived and worked in Philadelphia ever since, serving as Professor of Fine Arts at the Community College of Philadelphia from 1969 to 2000 and is now Professor Emerita. Burko has also taught at Princeton University, Arizona State University, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

A devoted feminist and founding member of the Women’s Caucus for Art, Burko has been a dedicated organizer for equity for women and nonbinary artists since 1972. In 1974, she founded the all-city festival FOCUS: Philadelphia Focus on Women in the Visual Arts. In 2024, she co-directed the 50-year-anniversary reprisal project (re)FOCUS: Then and Now, which included a citywide slate of programming and exhibitions and a full catalog as part of her ongoing commitment to the Feminist Art movement. She was the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art in 2011.

Throughout her artistic life, the landscape has been her focus. Her initial fascination with the enormity of geological phenomena, has evolved to embracing the landscape through a more ecological lens. It was her ambitious snow mountain paintings which first attracted the attention of storied gallerist Ivan Karp in 1976, offered Burko a “Dealer’s Showcase” at OK Harris Gallery in New York, landing a review by critic David Bourdon, in The Village Voice which then led to a series of gallery showings on 57th street through the late 70’s and early 80’s.

Her fascination with awe-inspiring vistas continued across media with a survey of the Waterways of Pennsylvania in colored pencil, based on her aerial photographs. That practice was first inspired by her flights over the Grand Canyon with artist James Turrell in 1977–78. She has utilized that aerial perspective ever since, depicting other American Southwest locations, Pacific Northwest Mountain ranges, the coasts of California and Maine, and the volcanoes of Alaska and Hawaii.

She also painted en plein air in France after the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund awarded Burko a six-month residency in Giverny in 1989, culminating in her 1990 exhibition Reflets at Locks Gallery in Philadelphia. She returned to Europe in 1993 after being awarded a residency at the Rockefeller Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, where she painted en plein air for five weeks. For her 1994 Locks Gallery exhibition Luci ed Ombra di Bellagio, Robert Rosenblum wrote the accompanying catalog essay.

Afterwards, Burko returned her focus to the local landscape, winning a three-year, $200,000 Public Art Commission to create Wissahickon Reflections—a suite of three monumental canvases installed in the interior of the Marriott International Hotel in Philadelphia.

At the turn of the century, a $50,000 Leeway Foundation award enabled Burko to travel to Hawaii, Italy, and Iceland to produce a series of photographs and paintings of volcanoes in the 2000s. While her work had always been invested in the marks that humans make on the landscape, it was at this point in her career that her work began to focus on anthropogenic climate change and climate change advocacy.

Her oil painting series Grinnell Mt. Gould 1-4—which utilized USGS imagery to display the effects of glacial melt over a period of almost 90 years—marked a significant shift in her practice away from simply painting the landscape and toward a more embodied practice of “bearing witness” to the land. It was at this point that her work began to include climate-related research and sustained dialogue with global leaders in climate science, Indigenous leaders, philosophers, and scholars. From 2012–2017, Burko embarked on a series of “Polar Investigations,” traveling around the world to research and witness climate-related glacial melt.

These investigations were supported by various grants and fellowships, such as The Independence Foundation’s support for her Arctic Circle residency in 2013 where she voyaged to Svalbard in the high Arctic with a group of 26 other artists. She joined a research team of geologists in Ny-Ålesund (the northernmost research station in the world) and flew and landed on the Kronebreen and Kongsvegen glaciers.

Witnessing melting ice as a key indicator of climate change continued in August 2014 with explorations at the Ilulissat and Eqi glaciers in Greenland. In December, she returned to Antarctica as a member of the educational team of the nonprofit Students on Ice. After returning from her two-week voyage to the Antarctic Peninsula, she traveled to El Calafate to explore Argentina’s Southern Patagonian Ice Field, focusing on the Upsala, Perito Moreno, and Viedma glaciers. Returning to the studio after these expeditions, she began to expand her artistic approach to explore recessional lines and cartographic perspectives as visual motifs.

After thoroughly exploring glacial melt, in 2018 Diane’s work shifted to the issue of coral reef degradation, as did her artistic approach. During this period, she began to explore video and lenticulars, and her painted works shifted to blend abstract-expressionist, landscape, and mixed-media approaches. Burko traveled extensively to places such as Kai ’Apapa, Rapa Nui, Atacama, and Chile to meet with scientists, students, and scholars to discuss research and continue her practice of bearing witness, producing several photographic, video, and painted works in response, including her landmark 56-foot-long World Map Series.

In 2020, her work began to respond directly to one of the most pressing global climate crises: the destruction of the Amazon Rainforest. At first, working from primary sources, Burko created monumental abstract works synthesizing the crisis, its local implications on Indigenous sovereignty, and its global impact on climate change. Burko was awarded a LABverde Residency in 2023, in the Amazon Rainforest in Manaus, and other areas of Amazonas in Brazil, allowing her to continue her practice of bearing witness. Returning to the studio, she produced multiple suites of large-scale paintings as well as her Amazon Grid Series, which was shown in the 2024 exhibition La Mayor Emergencía in Madrid. In 2025, Diane spent a week immersed in the Atlantic Rainforest after being awarded an Awasi Artist Immersion Residency, exploring new approaches to capturing the beauty of the rainforest. She produced graphite rubbings, new photographic explorations, and drone imagery as ways to dynamically record the landscape. Her works have increasingly included sculptural elements and material investigations.

Her 2021 solo exhibition Seeing Climate Change at the American University Museum unified Burko’s landscape and climate-related works—paintings, photographs, lenticulars, and video—from 2002–2021 into one exhibition. This exhibition was cited by The New York Times as one of the best exhibitions of the year. Longtime climate activist Bill McKibben wrote the accompanying catalog essay.

Seeing Climate Change solidified Burko on the international stage as one of the foremost climate-concerned artists, going on to show her works at the Royal Academy of Arts, London; Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid; the Minneapolis Institute of Art; the National Academy of Sciences; the Phillips Collection; RISD Museum; the Tang Museum of Art; and Wesleyan University Center for the Arts. Her work is also held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the National Academy of Sciences, the Phillips Collection, the Tang Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

In 2022, her painting Summer Heat I and II was used in a study published in Communications Earth & Environment, and further covered in multiple publications such as Forbes and Hyperallergic, which found that visual art has the capacity to bridge political divides and increase awareness of climate change issues.

She was also recently awarded an artist interpreter role in a five-year NSF Grant-funded project with the Arctic Radium Isotope Observation Network, collaborating with scientists at Woods Hole and Rowan University, culminating in a solo exhibition in 2026 at Rowan University Gallery and Museum that utilizes and conveys the researchers’ findings.

She was approached by the Cristin Tierney Gallery in New York for her 2025 solo exhibition Diane Burko: Bearing Witness. This exhibition marked her first solo show in New York in over 40 years. She is now represented by Cristin Tierney Gallery.

The throughline in Burko’s career is her devotion to justice and advocacy, whether that be displayed through her antiwar activism, her years of feminist organizing, continued practices of advocating for climate justice and Indigenous sovereignty, or her dedicated mentorship and support of many young artists and creatives. To continue to follow Burko’s career, please visit her website: https://dianeburko.com. In September 2013 she voyaged to Svalbard in the high Arctic with a group of 26 other artists. Before that expedition she was invited to join a research team of geologists in Ny-Alesund (Northern most research station in the world), as they flew and landed on top of Glaciers Kronebreen and Kongsvegen. This complimented her earlier expedition to Antarctica in January. Witnessing melting ice as a key indicator of climate change continued in August, 2014 with explorations at Ilulissat and Eqi glaciers in Greenland. In December she returned to Antarctica as a member of the educational team of the non-profit Students on Ice. After returning from her two-week voyage to the Antarctic peninsula, she flew to El Calafatte to explore the southern Patagonian Ice field of Argentina: the Upsala, Perdito Moreno, and Viedma Glaciers specifically.

Although Burko has traveled to Iceland, Greenland, the Antarctic and other places she has painted, most of her work is done in her studio from photographs taken by governmental agencies (e.g. USGS), individuals (e.g. Bradford Washburn), or from her own expeditions.

For more than 40 years Diane Burko has focused on monumental and geological phenomena throughout the world based on her ability to investigate actual locations on the ground and in the air from open-door helicopters and planes with cameras and sketchpads. Traveling from the temperate zones of America to those of Western Europe, from rain forests to regions of glaciers and active volcanoes, she has created paintings and photographs that merge the panoramic with the intimate.

In 1977, while flying with artist James Turrell in his Helio Courier over the Grand Canyon, Burko captured her first aerial photographs of the landscape. Since then, this has been her preferred process of securing landscape imagery as source material for her paintings. However, since 2000 she began making photographs as art works in themselves.

Since 2006, Burko has focused on climate change, situating her practice at the intersection of art and science. In her Politics of Snow Project, and with the addition of the more recent Polar Investigations work, she continues to invent visual strategies to make the invisible visible and visceral to the public. This archive contains a comprehensive selection of catalogs and printed ephemera related to her entire career, and source images for 89 paintings, which comprise the majority of the Politics of Snow project, as well as images from 2012 that are part of her Polar Investigations work.

Materials include ephemera from Burko’s artistic career, project cover sheets and working reference photographs from her two bodies of work, Politics of Snow (2007-2012) and Polar Investigations (from 2013-ongoing), an Arctic and Antarctic blog, and online interviews.

Burko’s art career archives from 1969 to 2000 reside at Rutgers University as part of the Miriam Schapiro Archives on Women Artists.

• 1 The Politics of Snow: 2007 – 2012
• 2 Polar Investigations: 2013 – 2016
• 3 Artist Blogs and Photographs: 2010 – 2017
• 4 Grant Materials: 2014
• 5 Exhibition Ephemera: 1977 – 2010
• 6 Exhibition Ephemera: 2011 – 2016
• 7 Exhibition Ephemera: 2017 – 2019
• 8 Outreach and Educational Materials: 2010 – 2019
• 9 Press and Online Materials: 2010 – 2017
• 10 Awards and Miscellaneous Materials: 2011 – 2018