AMANDA BURNHAM

About the Artist

Amanda Burnham (born Toledo, Ohio, 1979) makes drawings and installations based on her explorations and encounters with the city. Her work has been exhibited widely; venues include the Volta Art Fair (Basel, Switzerland), Halle Nord (Geneva, Switzerland), the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, the Toledo Museum of Art, The American University Art Museum (DC), the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, the Cranbrook Institute of Art, Benrimon Contemporary (NYC), Bridge Gallery (NYC), Christina Ray Gallery (NYC), Dorsch Gallery (Miami), and GV/AS Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), as well as numerous other venues nationally and internationally. She was one of Mera Rubell’s selections for The Washington Project for the Art’s SELECT 2014 exhibition hosted at Marianne Boesky Gallery in NYC and Artisphere. She has been the recipient of a Rubys Grant from the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance, Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council in 2010, 2013, and 2015, a Mayor’s Art Award via the Creative Baltimore Fund in 2014, and was named a Sondheim Art Prize semifinalist in 2012, 2013, and 2014. She was chosen to be featured in the South Issue of “New American Paintings” in 2016. In spring 2015 she was a resident fellow at the Embassy of Foreign Artists in Geneva, Switzerland. For summer 2016, she is a resident at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai, China. A graduate of Harvard University (BA) and Yale University (MFA). Burnham lives and works in Baltimore, MD, USA, where she is currently an Associate Professor at Towson University.

Artist's Statement

I make drawings and drawing installations based on my explorations of and encounters with the city. Often working on site, outside or in my car, I read the landscape for found fragments of language and record the poetics of vacant lots, moveable type signs, billboards, and rowhouses with ink and other water media on paper. I often piece fragments together in a cumulative manner not unlike the way the urban landscape is collectively authored over time. My drawing installations expand upon these explorations, layering and stitching together found visual elements of the landscape in conversation with the site against which they have been displaced, using paint, artificial turf, concrete, sand, and trash directly on the wall.