Climate artist and activist Diane Burko stays busy. Her research-based, environmentally focused practice has taken her around the globe. Driven by relentless curiosity, she has traversed glaciers in the Arctic Circle, explored Antarctica multiple times with glacial geologists, and joined oceanographers and pilots on month-long expeditions to Hawaii and American Samoa—witnessing and documenting the rapid changes unfolding in the planet’s most vulnerable ecosystems.
Blending scientific data with artistic expression, Burko’s work serves as a powerful form of environmental monitoring, fusing maps, charts, and graphs with formal painting. She pushes the boundaries of data visualization, showing how art can capture what numbers alone cannot.
Her current solo exhibition, Bearing Witness, on view at Cristin Tierney Gallery, showcases a selection of her energetic collages and large-scale paintings that spark genuine curiosity about our natural world and the climate phenomena shaping it.
WM: To start, can you introduce us to your practice? When and where did your journey as both an artist and a climate-focused artist begin?
DIANE BURKO: I’m a research-based artist working at the intersection of art, science, and the environment. My career began in the 1970s. I entered my MFA program creating large oil-stick abstract works and left with landscapes inspired by monumental geological phenomena, initially sourced from National Geographic and calendar photographs.
That quickly evolved into taking my own aerial photographs of vistas such as the Grand Canyon and the coastlines of Maine, California, and the Pacific Northwest. Residencies in Bellagio and Giverny, along with grants to fly over and into remote locations further enriched my visual vocabulary.
However, by the 21st century, the joy of painting awe-inspiring vistas no longer felt satisfying. My focus shifted to the precarity of these landscapes, leading me to become a climate activist. I began engaging with environmental scientists and bearing witness to sites of climate emergency in the Arctic, Antarctic, Pacific Ocean, and, presently, the Amazon rainforest.