Donald Burgy

Last updated
Donald Thomas Burgy
Born1937 (age 8485)
NationalityAmerican
Known forAmerican Conceptual Artist, Professor Emeritus in the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston
Spouse(s)Joy Renjilian-Burgy
ChildrenSons: Lucien Heart (Formerly Lucien Boston Sky Renjilian Burgy and Sarkis Love (Formerly Sarkis Boston Sky Renjilian Burgy)
Website http://www.donaldburgy.com

Donald Burgy (born 1937) is an American conceptual artist, author, and teacher. He is Professor Emeritus in the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (at that time known as the Massachusetts College of Art) in Boston in 1959 and a Master of Fine Arts from Rutgers University in 1963. Burgy began his teaching career in 1960 teaching art in public schools in Quincy and Chicopee in MA, and in Brentwood, NY. From 1966 - 1973, Burgy taught Art History and Art Studio at the Bradford Junior College in Bradford, MA. He was the chair of the Art Department at Milton Academy in Milton, MA from 1973 - 1975. Burgy taught Studio Art at Harvard University before his tenure at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (at that time known as the Massachusetts College of Art) in the Studio for Interrelated Media in Boston from 1971 until 2001. Donald Burgy has studied neurology, cosmology, and Paleolithic art as the basis for his conceptual artwork since 1969.

Contents

Background

Donald Burgy has received grants from the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller National Endowment, National Endowment for the Arts, and Massachusetts Council on the Arts. His work has been exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, at the Stadtiches Museum, Leverkusen, Germany, the Third Conference on Planetology and Space Mission Planning, New York Academy of Sciences, New York. His work includes a book entitled, Art Ideas for the Year 4000, published by the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA. Donald Burgy is one of the founders of the Conceptual Art Movement.

Collections

Related Research Articles

Conceptual art, also referred to as conceptualism, is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns. Some works of conceptual art, sometimes called installations, may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions. This method was fundamental to American artist Sol LeWitt's definition of conceptual art, one of the first to appear in print:

In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.

Joseph Kosuth

Joseph Kosuth, an American conceptual artist, lives in New York and London, after having resided in various cities in Europe, including Ghent and Rome.

Sol LeWitt American artist

Solomon "Sol" LeWitt was an American artist linked to various movements, including conceptual art and minimalism.

Robert C. Morgan

Robert C. Morgan is an American art critic, art historian, curator, poet, and artist.

Paul Laffoley

Paul Laffoley was an American visionary artist and architect from Boston, Massachusetts.

Frank Gohlke is an American landscape photographer. He has been awarded two Guggenheim fellowships, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Fulbright Scholar Grant. His work is included in numerous permanent collections, including those of Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Mel Bochner is an American conceptual artist. Bochner received his BFA in 1962 and honorary Doctor of Fine Arts in 2005 from the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. He lives in New York City.

Lucy Rowland Lippard is an American writer, art critic, activist, and curator. Lippard was among the first writers to argue for the "dematerialization" at work in conceptual art and was an early champion of feminist art. She is the author of 21 books on contemporary art and has received numerous awards and accolades from literary critics and art associations.

Anne Whitney American sculptor

Anne Whitney was an American sculptor and poet. She made full-length and bust sculptures of prominent political and historical figures, and her works are in major museums in the United States. She received prestigious commissions for monuments. Two statues of Samuel Adams were made by Whitney and are located in Washington, D.C.'s National Statuary Hall Collection and in front of Faneuil Hall in Boston. She also created two monuments to Leif Erikson.

David Hilliard is an American photographer. A fine arts photographer who works mainly with panoramic photographs, he draws inspiration from his personal life and those around him for his subject matter. Many of the scenes are staged, evoking a performative quality, a middle ground between fact and fiction.

Robert Barry is an American artist. Since 1967, Barry has produced non-material works of art, installations, and performance art using a variety of otherwise invisible media. In 1968, Robert Barry is quoted as saying "Nothing seems to me the most potent thing in the world."

Agnes Denes is a Hungarian-born American conceptual artist based in New York. She is known for works in a wide range of media—from poetry and philosophical writings to extremely detailed drawings, sculptures, and iconic land art works, such as Wheatfield—A Confrontation (1982), a two-acre field of wheat in downtown Manhattan, commissioned by the Public Art Fund, and Tree Mountain—A Living Time Capsule (1992–96) in Ylojärvi, Finland.

Gary Schneider is a South African-born American photographer known for his portraiture and self-portraits. According to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, which awarded him a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013, his "early work in painting, performance, and film remain integral to his explorations of portraiture. He strives to marry art and science, identity and obscurity, figuration and abstraction, the carnal and the spiritual."

Nanno de Groot was a self-taught artist. He belonged to the group of New York School Abstract expressionist artists of the 1950s. He wrote:

In moments of clarity of thought I can sustain the idea that everything on earth is nature, including that which springs forth from a man's mind, and hand. A Franz Kline is nature as much as a zinnia.

Sheila Pepe is an artist and educator living and working in Brooklyn, New York. She is a prominent figure as a lesbian cross-disciplinary artist, whose work employs conceptualism, surrealism, and craft to address feminist and class issues. Her most notable work is characterized as site-specific installations of web-like structure crocheted from domestic and industrial material, although she works with sculpture and drawing as well. She has shown in museums and art galleries throughout the United States.

Wen-Ying Tsai

Wen-Ying Tsai was a Chinese-American pioneer cybernetic sculptor and kinetic artist best known for creating sculptures using electric motors, stainless steel rods, stroboscopic light, and audio feedback control. As one of the first Chinese-born artists to achieve international recognition in the 1960s, Tsai was an inspiration to generations of Chinese artists around the world.

Charles Prendergast American painter

Charles Prendergast was a Canadian-American Post-Impressionist artist as well as a designer and maker of picture frames. He was the younger brother of the artist, Maurice Prendergast.

Laylah Ali (born 1968, Buffalo, New York) is a contemporary visual artist known for paintings in which ambiguous race relations are depicted with a graphic clarity and cartoon strip format.

Lauren Fensterstock is an American artist, writer, curator, critic, and educator living and working in Portland, Maine. Fensterstock’s work has been widely shown nationally at venues such as the John Michael Kohler Art Center (WI), the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (ME), the Portland Museum of Art (ME), and is held in public and private collections throughout the U.S, Europe, and Asia.

Melvin Joel Zabarsky (1932–2019) was an American figurative painter who created representational work in the narrative tradition. Known for a bright, bold palette, his work often explores political, historical and cultural themes to surreal and realist effect. In a six-decade career marked by several distinct phases, Zabarsky's imaginative use of color, formal experimentation and commitment to narrative organization in both traditional and avant garde styles are hallmarks of his work. In an interview with the British philosophers Donald and Monica Skilling, he said, "I'm discovering history, or a narrative, within a painting, as I go along."

References