Climate Art Beat: Winter Calendar 2025

For five decades, Diane Burko has traversed the globe's extreme environments, from the Arctic to the Amazon, to compile a visual record "bearing witness" to the realities of climate change. The paintings in Diane Burko: Bearing Witness reflect this journey. Her World Reef series (which includes Reef Map 1) captures coral reef devastation wrought by warming seawater and bleaching. Her World Glacier series depicts the alarming retreat of ice as seas encroach on glaciers. Burko's paintings draw on scientific data, alluded to with map-like details and other notations in her art. She also employs painting techniques that create textured surfaces echoing the fragility of the natural world. In short, Burko uses "the language of paint" to create "visual poetry that draws you in, compels you to look closely, and then reveals some ugly truths." The effect is simultaneously powerful and energizing-powerful by virtue of its expressive urgency, and energizing by its celebration of the Earth's stunning beauty.