Climate art: More and better with time

When Philadelphia-based artist Diane Burko decided to paint glaciers, she couldn’t have predicted she’d in time be perched at age 68 atop a polar iceberg, decked out in her first pair of crampons and sharing the grayscale view with a glaciologist and a helicopter engineer.

Diane Burko on Svalbard’s Kronebreen Glacier,
during her first-ever trip to a glacier, in September 2013. 

The on-and-off helicopter ride from the northern-most research station in the world took place in 2013, but Burko’s journey had really begun in a gallery in Doylestown, Pennsylvania in 2006. That’s when a history-minded curator asked if she could contribute some early work to complement an exhibit of her current work. With her agreement to do so, a massive 70-by-110-inch acrylic rendering of a snowy alpine mountain Burko had painted in 1976 soon wound up with its own gallery wall.

But unlike most run-of-the-mill trawls through an archive, revisiting this particular decades-old piece, at this particular time, was no less than “life-changing” for the artist.

“I remember I was walking through the exhibit, answering questions, talking with people, but inside I’m thinking, oh my god, I painted this 30 years ago,” she says. “I’m older, my life has changed, and then I thought of the snow, and wondered if that French Alpine snow was still there.”

Read the Yale Climate Connections story by Daisy Simmons - “Climate art: More and better with time.”