THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Diane Burko

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

Artist. Climate Activist. College Professor. Founder of FOCUS: Philadelphia Focuses on Women in the Visual Arts, celebrating women artists, collectors and writers, 1974. Reprised 50 years later, in 2024 as (re)FOCUS. Testified at the State Department, relative to the Year of the Woman, 1975. Active in the National Women’s Caucus for Art throughout the 1980s. Developed the project Politics of Snow, investigating the historical comparisons of global climate change through images culled from glacial geological data recorded throughout the world.

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, June 2026