The Figge Art Museum walls are a canvas for Baltimore-based artist Amanda Burnham.
The 47-year-old artist told WVIK in an interview on Oct. 6. that, for as long as she can remember, she lined notebooks with drawings. It wasn’t until college that she learned visual art could be a career path.
“And as soon as I realized that, there was no other path that I could imagine for myself,” Burnham said.
Soon, her singular vantage drawings transformed into 3D collage installations responding to the city around her, including unplanned interactions, emphasizing the darkly comic and absurd.
“I got as interested in the unplanned interactions that would inevitably happen to me by sitting on a median or something for four hours to make a drawing, as I was in making the drawing itself. So I started to ask myself, what is a way I could make drawings that would really start to capture that?,” Burnham said. “The vitality, the multiple viewpoints, the energy, the movement, because I didn't feel like small singular vantage drawings really did that. And that's how my particular way of making installation came to be.”
According to the artist’s website, her pieces are “composed of hundreds of quick, gestural acrylic and flashe paint sketches made with a fat brush that are then cut and collaged onto both built armatures and the existing surfaces of a space; these are sometimes further animated with embedded lighting. The effect is somewhere between a comic book and a stage set.”
Burnham notes her process begins with each installation meditating on a theme and creating drawings from that meditation.
“So ultimately, I'm outputting hundreds of drawings. I'm like a writer in a first draft,” Burnham said. “I let everything come out, and everything that comes out gets cut into pieces, and those pieces get rolled up, and they get shipped to the museum. They got shipped to the Figge in several huge boxes. And then when I get here, I unroll them. I flatten them, and I sort them into piles. Think of it almost like a palette, like a painter's palette.
“It is collage, but I'm regarding the walls of the gallery space as the way a painter would regard their canvas,” Burnham said. “That's my canvas. And then the piles of these…pink pieces or blue pieces, or here's some legs, or here's some arms, whatever categorization I decide that get piled up. That's my palette. So really the piece doesn't happen. It isn't realized until I'm in the space, and the way I'm treating the wall is as a painter would treat the canvas. I'm picking up a drawing and putting it on the wall, stapling it to the wall, and that's a mark. And then I'm deciding what's the mark that I put next to it, and on and on and hundreds of decisions.”
The artist states the theme of her installation at the Figge is how individuals function within the structures of society and, specifically, the current moment the country is in, where there is an awful lot of conflict and anger and a lot of structural difficulty in simply surviving.
“Things about how our politics are organized, about how our nation and our society are organized that are large, not necessarily human-centered structures, but that are structures nonetheless that dictate and shape how we are able to exist in our individual lives,” Burnham said. “And so I think about that, and I think about the sort of act of survival and the act of the daily acts of survival that are necessitated amongst— among individuals within that context, the ways that people are able to make it work even when it's very, very difficult.”
The installation will feature numerous large-scale drawings of people, specifically women.
“I'm a woman, I'm a mother. I think it's especially challenging in those identities in this particular moment. And the dynamic at play is these individuals fighting to exist within a chaotic setting, within a chaotic construct, a construct that isn't made for them necessarily, a construct that isn't designed to function for them necessarily,” Burnham said. “But yet here we are, and how do we make it work? How do we survive? How do we thrive? How do we function? That's the narrative at play here. And so what you'll find are these figures that are sort of pushing against their environment, that are making space for themselves, that are sometimes really in a battle with their— with the ground in which they find themselves.”
The Figge Art Museum is holding an artist talk with Burnham Thursday, Oct. 8, at 6 p.m. The exhibit will officially open to the public on Saturday, Oct. 10 and will be on display through mid-February 2027. The exhibit's supporting sponsor is “In Memory of Nancy Bach,” and the contributing sponsor is TBK Bank.
“My full attention is here right now. I mentioned that I am doing comics as well, and I actually have a full-length graphic memoir that I'm collaborating on with a writer. I have a feeling it might be the next thing that I am turning my attention to. But I view these practices as very related. I mean, the work that I do on an installation basis is totally adjacent to storytelling, formally derived and related to the work I do in books,” Burnham said. “So I'm excited to shift the modalities, but not the theme, and not completely take myself out of the installation. I've been thinking a lot too lately about how some of the ways that I approach installation can infuse some of my smaller-scale, narrative, sequential narrative work. So I'm excited to sort of explore even more of the overlap between those two things.”
You can listen to WVIK’s full interview with Amanda Burnham below.
This story was produced by WVIK, Quad Cities NPR. We rely on financial support from our listeners and readers to provide coverage of the issues that matter to the Quad Cities region and beyond. As someone who values the content created by WVIK's news department, please consider making a financial contribution to support our work.
