THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Diane Burko

“If you’re a feminist, you’re an environmentalist.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, June 2026

DB:  My name is Diane Burko, and I was born in Brooklyn, New York.

JW:  And when was that?

DB:  80 years ago, 1945.

JW:  All right, I’m close, I’m 1947. Briefly tell us like about your childhood, sort of before you knew about the women’s movement Did you have siblings? What did your parents project for you? That kind of thing.

DB:  Okay, well, I am an only child and I’m a child of immigrants, so I’m a first-generation American. And of course, what parents expected their children at that time, you know, this was the land of milk and honey, 80-some-odd years ago. And so they expected me to be the golden child and achieve everything. And I kind of fulfilled a lot of their expectations, you know, being a high achiever in school.

And I think I realized after [that] it had to do with being an only child and being a girl. I got a lot more attention than I would have if indeed I was in a family with lots of boys and brothers. And so I moved up on. I think they became only a bit disappointed and puzzled with me when at the end, when my father thought I was going to be a judge and a lawyer and a mathematician, and my mother thought I’d get married right away to a very rich man. Uh, that was a disappointment because I went on to art school.

JW:  Oh my gosh.

DB:  But later in life, they became very proud, but it took a while.

JW:  Took a while. Yeah, I— those expectations I know about. When did you learn about the women’s movement?

DB:  Probably in the ’70s, when I was fully formed. I was not aware of it, quite frankly, as a teenager, as I grew up, because I guess I lived in a sort of a bubble where, you know, everything was easy and I didn’t have a problem. And I went to an all-women’s college.

JW:  Aha. Aha.

DB:  So that reinforced the fact that I felt I could do anything. I really did not understand the issues at hand. I hadn’t read The Feminist Mystique yet or any of those books when I was a teenager, even 17 or 18. I also graduated from high school early, as most New Yorkers did. They skipped a grade if they had some intelligence. I was 16 when I started college. And it was really after graduating and starting graduate school that I began to understand it.

First, I think my first inkling was when I was invited back to speak to students at Skidmore College, where I had graduated from, to talk to the girls about what it means to be an artist. And what was shocking to me is most of the questions were not about the paintings I had just shown them and telling them about graduate school, but more, “How can you balance being married and being an artist?” And like, that blew my mind away. I mean, I wanted them to talk about my work. So that was a, you know, a sort of introduction.

But I got fully blown into the reality of it as I became a very young college professor and went off to my first college art convention, conference, way out in San Francisco. And this was in 1972. And at this conference, which is made up of art historians and artists who teach in universities and colleges, I was exposed to a lot of rancor and anger by these older art historians who were having a meeting that I somehow got swept into, where they were protesting the fact that there were no women on the board of the College Art Association.

JW:  Wow. Amazing.

DB:  Well, this is 1972, and this is the heat of the women’s movement, which of course affected the art movement. And I serendipitously met at that moment some real feminist leaders, Anne Sullivan Harris, who did this incredible groundbreaking show with Linda Nochlin about women artists that came out, I guess, in the late ’70s, and it was Women Artists, 1850 to 1950, and it went across America.

At that time I met two other feminist art historians, Mary Garrard and Norma Browdy, from Washington. They taught at Washington University. So that’s how I began being aware of the movement. Now, coincided to that, I no longer lived in Brooklyn, New York. I had moved to Philadelphia for my MFA at University of Pennsylvania. So I was an outsider in Philadelphia, and it’s sort of like being an outsider in Boston. You have to break in. But as a New York outsider, I realize in hindsight, I assumed I could do anything I wanted. And so I went ahead and did. And what I decided was that something had to happen in Philadelphia to bring them aware, bring the awareness of women artists.

And what helped that along is there had just been the year before, a conference at the Corcoran organized by women about women artists. I found out about it after it happened, so there was no way I could have gone to it, but I had friends in D.C. and I went, and they knew women who had organized it, and I met with them. Rosemary Wright and Mary Beth Edelson were the leaders.

Rosemary’s still around. Mary Beth has passed. Very famous artists. And they sat down with me and they told me what they did. And I went back to Philadelphia and decided I was going to do that. And so I did. And I think that comes to your next question is how I got involved. That’s when my feminism full bloom was out.

JW:  And what did you do exactly?

DB:  The first thing I did is I had the audacity to invite people I did not know to my home, plus women I knew – artists, young artists and educators – to a meeting. And at that meeting was Anne d’Harnoncourt, who at that point was a curator. She wasn’t the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art yet, and some other powerful women. And we talked about what we could do, and we decided we should organize a number of exhibitions around women artists.

That was the beginning. And then there was a public meeting that happened because it somehow appeared in the paper. I still don’t know how it happened. So we decided— well, we knew we were going have a meeting, but I didn’t know it was going to be that publicized. Another meeting to open it up to the community. Well, the community was like New Jersey, Delaware. I got letters— there was no email at the time— from women who said, “I very much want to participate. It’s so important for women to be showing their work, blah, blah, blah.” So we had this meeting, and from that meeting we organized a steering committee.

I became the head of it, and we had different committees: fundraising, exhibitions, programs, etc. And we worked on this for about a year in 1973, and it resulted in a series of major programs and exhibitions throughout the city of Philadelphia. One was a national show, which happened at the Convention Center, and some of the women in that show— I will give you a sampling – were Eleanor Antin, Isabel Bishop, Louise Bourgeois, Barbara Chase-Riboud.

I’m giving you the big names. Agnes Dennis, Elaine de Kooning, Mary Beth Edelson, Audrey Flack, Janet Fish. These were all not well-known names way back 50-some-odd years ago. How did we get these artists to come? We didn’t do it. We invited 5 curators of great reputation, including Marcia Tucker, who had just opened the New Museum in New York City.

And we asked them to each select 20 artists, to invite them. They did, and there were overlaps, so we had 82 in the group, and we had this major, major show. It was covered in the New York Times. Grace Glove came down to visit with us, Lawrence Alloway, Art America, every art magazine, because we didn’t have Hyperallergic at that time. Every art magazine covered it.

And it wasn’t just this one show. We had a series that lasted, of events that lasted about 3 months. Film festivals, poetry readings, panels. It was, it was really quite amazing. And, you know, it just evolved because we said we’re going to do it. We did not have a huge budget, but myself and Judy Brodsky, who became my finance steering committee member and still a great dear, a close friend of mine.

We did the fundraising and we approached a major bank in Philadelphia, PSFS, which no longer exists. And we got a, I think, a $20,000 or $25,000 grant. And that’s how we paid for this major show. One of the interesting parts of the show is one of the artists was a woman named Judy Bernstein. And I don’t know if I can find it right now, but Judy Bernstein is now an internationally famous artist. She did this thing called the Hairy Screw. And, you know, you got it.

Well, the director saw— we’re hanging the show the night before, we’re figuring everything out. And the director comes over and he says, “This show cannot go on if that is in the exhibition.” So censorship. And, you know, we were stuck between a rock and a hard place. The show’s opening, everyone knows about it.

It was a few days before. So we agreed, and what we did instead is we printed buttons that we gave out to everyone that said, “Where’s Bernstein?” And Judy always says that was the beginning of her career, because of course it got a lot of press. So that’s what we did.

JW:  So tell me what happened when people were asking, “Well, where is she?”

DB:  Well, of course we told the story, you know, and that actual drawing, which was 10 feet long. It was huge because the show was a convention center. It was like a big museum. We had huge pieces in it. That has been since acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

JW:  I love it.

DB:  It’s a good story. And if we fast forward, in 2024 was the 50th anniversary. So Judy Brodsky and I decided that we had to commemorate this historic event. And at that point, we were able to raise funds and we created a catalog of that major show. That was the name of the whole project was called “Focus: Philadelphia focuses on women in the visual arts, past and present.”

And we reenacted that show, but not with huge pieces because we had a smaller space at Moore College of Art. But what we were able to do is in the exhibition, here’s a sample page. We showed what was shown 50 years ago, and we were able to get a piece from that artist or the artist’s estate that we actually showed. Oh, it was a very historic show.

We really were lucky to get this published because of one wonderful a donor that was sort of generous enough to back the whole thing. Harriet Weiss and her husband, who were graphic designer printers way back, and we— I went to her assuming she would help a little. She said, what’s the budget? And she said, we’re gonna do it.

That’s why we have this historic catalog, which was given out to museums, etc. And we also still have a website that’s online that anyone could go to that says Refocus2024.com. All of the shows are there. Now, this was the main show, but then we were able to instigate, encourage, and help 65 other institutions throughout the area, plus Jersey. There were— there was a show at Rowan University, Swarthmore, all the way, and they did their own exhibitions or programming all around women in the visual arts. And this time there was much more of a focus on female-identified artists, LGBT, you know, it was much broader. So it was quite successful. And that’s my big contribution.

JW:  I want to hear about your own art.

DB:  Oh, well, that’s gone on forever, and I’m still a practicing artist. I am represented by the Cristin Tierney Gallery in New York, and I just have a thriving practice. But there is a through line. Again, you know, you see all these things as you get older. I’m very much a political animal. So there was the women’s movement, but before that I was an anti-war person. You know, who demonstrated, the feminists. You know, my thing is also, if you’re a feminist, you’re an environmentalist. And so that’s where I put my energies the last 25 years, is that I’m a climate activist. And my work, which started out being about landscape, still is, but now it’s more focused on ecology and the environment.

JW:  Clearly, you’ve continued your artwork, and what, tell me more about your continuous political work.

DB:  Well, I was a college professor for about 30 years.

JW:  Where was that?

DB:  The reason I stayed in Philadelphia is I got a job at Philadelphia Community College right out of graduate school. So, you know, that’s a good thing for an artist to have. We call it a day job. And I also was very fortunate to be taken on by the major gallery in Philadelphia, the Locks Gallery. And so with those two things locked up and great space, because real estate in Philly was always much better than SoHo, I stayed. And as an— so I’m an— oh, and I also taught at Princeton, you know, other places. Over the years, small stints. Princeton was an associate professor thing for, for a semester because they invite artists to do that.

So I’m an educator, and once I got involved in the climate movement, I made work about it and also made expeditions so that I’ve been to the Arctic and the Antarctic, the Amazon rainforest. I’ve done a lot of projects where we— my husband and I, who’s a landscape architect, where we’ve traveled and experienced the landscape, the issues, and also met with many researchers and scientists. So I have worked with them, have lots of exchanges with them. I’m an Instar fellow, I don’t know what the right title is, out in Boulder. I mean, I have a lot of associations with Earth scientists.

And when I have an exhibition, I think I’ve made this a rule maybe about 15 years ago. Whether it’s in a university museum or a museum or a gallery, I request and basically require that there’s public programming around the exhibition. And that could take the form of my giving a lecture or a panel of artists and scientists, but some kind of public forum so that the issues that my paintings or photographs or videos are about talk about the issue.

JW:  Oh, well, that’s very interesting. And so where, where have you exhibited then?

DB:  Twice at the London Academy of Fine Arts in ’22 and ’24. What the one was on climate, and I was invited. I had no idea what it was about, but they shipped over a 15-foot by 8-foot painting, so it was pretty major representation. I was in another show in Madrid that was called “The Greatest Emergency,” again about climate, an international show. And of course, I exhibited in New York and Philadelphia, Minneapolis Art Museum, Palmer Art Museum. I have a long resume. I’d have to go look it all up.

JW:  Well, it sounds like you figured out a way to balance your art and your marriage and home life and whatever. Would you say that’s true?

DB:  Yes. I mean, I didn’t plan it that way. Things just sort of happened. And I think, you know, you’re open to the universe, and if you’re an open person, you evolve. So, you know, I just— coming from a place like New York, had never been to wide open spaces. So the first thing I did was go to the Grand Canyon. I always was interested in monumental geological formations.

So I started there going out west and one thing led to another. And then when climate change was in the air, if you, you know, if you had half a brain, you were aware of it. They called it global warming then. You know, I responded and I kept learning. And then all of a sudden I got invited to science conferences because they realized, and I agree, as much as they know, these great researchers from NOAA and, you know, all over, USGS, they don’t have to necessarily be good communicators to the public. They’re dealing with very arcane, esoteric stuff. So they realized that artists can communicate on a much more emotional level. And I’m just amongst many hundreds who have been part of that movement.

A good example is I’m having a show opening in September at the Rowan University Museum of Contemporary Art, which is basically, it’s based on an NSF grant that was given to artists in Woods Hole and also at Rutgers to study, to research radium isotopes in the Siberian Sea. And to track climate change trends, et cetera. Well, that’s kind of complicated, isn’t it? So they wrote me into their grant, which helped them get the grant, because I’m like the public connector.

And so there’ll be an exhibition about that, images from their 5-year study that will open, I think, on September 16th. But it’s also combining with other work I’ve done recently, which is about the Amazon rainforest, where I’ve had a residency in Manaus in Brazil. So, and that’s all about focusing on extraction, extraction of gold, silver, deforestation, all those issues that are destroying our ecology and Indigenous land.

And the curator, Mary Salvante, had this notion that instead of just focusing on this ARION, A-R-I-O-N, study, which is really about extracting knowledge and facts to contribute to figuring out what to do. There’s also this concept of extraction, which is a little bit more negative, a little bit more creepy, which is taking stuff out of the land and taking it away from people and destroying their waters and their livelihood, etc. And so it’s really a combination of some of my Amazon work as well as the scientific study.

JW:  Sounds fascinating. So in addition to you being a model for women and what they could do, have you done any other feminist quote unquote activities?

DB:  I Marched on Washington. Contributed to Emily’s List, things like that. But no, I’ve sort of stayed in my lane. I’m a mentor to young women artists, you know, naturally open to, you know, different issues, talking and meeting with people. But I think my, you know, major contribution certainly was the FOCUS effort. And that’s why it was so gratifying bringing it up 50 years later to a current audience of young people who never knew anything about it. Because unfortunately, you have to keep reintroducing issues to people, especially at a time like this where women are being knocked down in every area. Including reproductive rights.

JW:  What would you say your early interests and your early activities, you know, how did it affect your whole life and the work you continue to do?

DB:  I guess it does start with your childhood, and I was really very fortunate to have parents who just thought the world of me. I mean, you know, I have a lot of neurotic friends that say, oh, well, you know, you’re not as neurotic as we are because you had all this love. But I think they’re right. I mean, I thought I could do anything, and I just went ahead, you know, with that in mind. And it’s true, if you think positively, look, you know, when the train’s in a tunnel, all the lights can’t be green at the same time. You have to keep going forward. And that’s always been my philosophy. Onward.

That’s why coming to this weird age is still something I have not adjusted to. So I just keep going forward and not really acknowledging how old I am, except my body sometimes tells me that when I’m working in the studio. But, you know, I guess that’s it. I just keep going, you know. And being open. I mean, I really think that’s the lesson of life is to stay curious, which I’m very science curious and being open. And then if you are, it’s really hard to square that with another 80-year-old who is ruining our country and only wants to go back in time.