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Bruce Burris
Corvallis Oregon
[email protected]
Selected 1,2 person exhibits
Fairbanks Gallery, Oregon State University Corvallis OR., A.L.S.O. Projects (Shrine / Sargent's Daughters) NYC. Institute 193, Lexington KY. Braunstein/Quay Gallery (x4 exhibits) San Francisco CA. Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids MI. Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, Wilmington DE. Janet Fleisher Gallery, Philadelphia PA. Anton Gallery, Washington DC (x2 exhibits). Joan Truckenbrod Gallery, Corvallis OR. Thunder-Sky Inc., Cincinnati OH. Nicolaysen Museum, Casper, WY. Summertime, Brooklyn NY., Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland OR. ,Birmingham Art Association, Birmingham, AL,. Spartanburg Museum of Art, Spartanburg, SC,. Carnegie Center, Covington, KY,. South Bend Regional Museum of Art, South Bend, IN,. Macon Museum of Art and Science, Macon GA., North Country Museum of Arts, Park Rapids, MN., Merced College, Merced, CA., Ursinus College, Collegeville, PA., Delaware State Arts Council, Wilmington, DE.,
Selected group exhibits
The Portland 2016 Biennial, curated by Michelle Grabner and presented by Disjecta Contemporary Art Center @c3:Initiative Hallie Ford Fellows in the Visual Arts 2017-19, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art
Making A Better Painting, Hoffman Gallery, Lewis & Clark College
Selected fellowships/Awards
Hallie Ford Foundation Artist Fellowship, Seattle Art Museum- Betty Bowen Award (Finalist), Pollack-Krasner Foundation Fellowship, Kentucky State Arts Council Al Smith Fellowship, Delaware State Arts Council Artist Fellowship, NEA-SAF Fellowship
Selected Collections
Allen Art Museum, Oberlin College, Hallie Ford Museum, Salem OR, University of Kentucky Art Museum
Selected bibliography
2021 Lauren O'Neil-Butler Artforum International, Bruce Burris March X Summertime
2012 Phillip March Jones, Whitehot Magazine, In conversation with Bruce Burris
2001 John Rapko, Artweek, Politics and Social Justice, Bruce Burris at Braunstein/Quay Gallery
1998 David Minton, Dialogue, Jed Clampett's Unlucky Cousins
1998 New American Paintings 1998
1995 Meredith Redlin, The Southern Quarterly, Cultural Hierarchy on the "trail a fears"
Selected community initiatives
2019-Present Curator/Director Living Studios (Cornerstone Associates) Corvallis, OR
2015-Present Grant Writer, Cornerstone Associates, Inc. Corvallis, OR
2015-Present Facilitator, Fairview... I left there but I remember (ongoing workshops, performances) Oregon
2014-Present Director, ArtWorks (CEI), Corvallis, OR
2013-Present Coordinator, OUTPOST1000
2013 Coordinator/Founder, In Visible (celebrating diversity in the arts) Corvallis, OR
2013 Curator, Latitude Artist Community, Lexington, KY
2012-2013 Founder, Undressing Normal (conference on sexuality and disability)
2006- 2015 Founder/Director, ELandF projects
2005-2013 Founder/Member, Eastern State Hospital Cemetery Project
2005-2013 Co-Founder/Member, Mayor's Commission on Citizens with Disabilities
2001-2012 Co-Owner/Founder, Latitude Artist Community, Lexington, KY
2002-2012 Co-Founder/Director, Theater of Possibilities/Stage948
1996-2000 Founder/Director, Minds Wide Open Art Center (Arc of the Bluegrass) Lexington, KY
Corvallis Oregon
[email protected]
Selected 1,2 person exhibits
Fairbanks Gallery, Oregon State University Corvallis OR., A.L.S.O. Projects (Shrine / Sargent's Daughters) NYC. Institute 193, Lexington KY. Braunstein/Quay Gallery (x4 exhibits) San Francisco CA. Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids MI. Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, Wilmington DE. Janet Fleisher Gallery, Philadelphia PA. Anton Gallery, Washington DC (x2 exhibits). Joan Truckenbrod Gallery, Corvallis OR. Thunder-Sky Inc., Cincinnati OH. Nicolaysen Museum, Casper, WY. Summertime, Brooklyn NY., Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland OR. ,Birmingham Art Association, Birmingham, AL,. Spartanburg Museum of Art, Spartanburg, SC,. Carnegie Center, Covington, KY,. South Bend Regional Museum of Art, South Bend, IN,. Macon Museum of Art and Science, Macon GA., North Country Museum of Arts, Park Rapids, MN., Merced College, Merced, CA., Ursinus College, Collegeville, PA., Delaware State Arts Council, Wilmington, DE.,
Selected group exhibits
The Portland 2016 Biennial, curated by Michelle Grabner and presented by Disjecta Contemporary Art Center @c3:Initiative Hallie Ford Fellows in the Visual Arts 2017-19, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art
Making A Better Painting, Hoffman Gallery, Lewis & Clark College
Selected fellowships/Awards
Hallie Ford Foundation Artist Fellowship, Seattle Art Museum- Betty Bowen Award (Finalist), Pollack-Krasner Foundation Fellowship, Kentucky State Arts Council Al Smith Fellowship, Delaware State Arts Council Artist Fellowship, NEA-SAF Fellowship
Selected Collections
Allen Art Museum, Oberlin College, Hallie Ford Museum, Salem OR, University of Kentucky Art Museum
Selected bibliography
2021 Lauren O'Neil-Butler Artforum International, Bruce Burris March X Summertime
2012 Phillip March Jones, Whitehot Magazine, In conversation with Bruce Burris
2001 John Rapko, Artweek, Politics and Social Justice, Bruce Burris at Braunstein/Quay Gallery
1998 David Minton, Dialogue, Jed Clampett's Unlucky Cousins
1998 New American Paintings 1998
1995 Meredith Redlin, The Southern Quarterly, Cultural Hierarchy on the "trail a fears"
Selected community initiatives
2019-Present Curator/Director Living Studios (Cornerstone Associates) Corvallis, OR
2015-Present Grant Writer, Cornerstone Associates, Inc. Corvallis, OR
2015-Present Facilitator, Fairview... I left there but I remember (ongoing workshops, performances) Oregon
2014-Present Director, ArtWorks (CEI), Corvallis, OR
2013-Present Coordinator, OUTPOST1000
2013 Coordinator/Founder, In Visible (celebrating diversity in the arts) Corvallis, OR
2013 Curator, Latitude Artist Community, Lexington, KY
2012-2013 Founder, Undressing Normal (conference on sexuality and disability)
2006- 2015 Founder/Director, ELandF projects
2005-2013 Founder/Member, Eastern State Hospital Cemetery Project
2005-2013 Co-Founder/Member, Mayor's Commission on Citizens with Disabilities
2001-2012 Co-Owner/Founder, Latitude Artist Community, Lexington, KY
2002-2012 Co-Founder/Director, Theater of Possibilities/Stage948
1996-2000 Founder/Director, Minds Wide Open Art Center (Arc of the Bluegrass) Lexington, KY
ARTFORUM May 2021
Bruce Burris
SUMMERTIME
Bruce Burris’s trippy, caustic, and unruly exhibition of drawings—organized by the curatorial platform March and presented at Summertime, a nonprofit art studio and gallery in Brooklyn—felt timely in its caricaturing of the deeply divided United States. The show opened one day before President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took the oath of office at the Capitol on January 20, 2021, while the nation was still reeling from an unthinkable attack by a violent mob there earlier in the month. The fourteen works on view, all made in 2020, were essentially heralds, announcing that our lives would be inundated with images of the vile Oath Keepers and their repugnant brethren. No joyful tidings here.
Chockablock stacks of ornately rendered words in acrylic, tempera, watercolor, marker, graphite, and spray paint radiated from each twenty-two-by-fifteen-inch sheet of paper. When starting a new drawing, Burris lays out his larger foundational writing first, then embellishes the spaces around it with other phrases and decorative flourishes, building up an unstable architecture bit by bit. Inside the borders of some of the pieces was an enclosed sea of tiny, nearly unreadable script in black pen. Take Labor Day, where the bright and buzzy name of Republican schlock rocker Ted Nugent is getting suffocated by phrases you might hear from his supporters, such as SAVE OUR JOBS, YOU CANNOT ROB US OF OUR HERITAGE, and WORKING FAMILIES ARE UNDER ATTACK.
As an artist, Burris has been producing in this aesthetic vein—protest posters gone berserk—since the 1980s. But he also has an inspiring history as an activist. For more than twenty-five years he’s been an advocate for neurodiverse artists and has founded several art centers devoted to cultural equity in Lexington, Kentucky, and in Corvallis, Oregon, where he now lives. However, this enduring commitment clashes with his artistic labor, which is all about insurrection. At times, his wild sampling of right-wing discourse can be downright nauseating. Guns Save Lives was the lone work here reduced to a palette of black, white, and blue, the colors of the Thin Blue Line flag, a sign of “support for law enforcement” and opposition to Black Lives Matter. Shrill proclamations, including PATRIOTS PREPARE and STAND FOR YOUR FLAG, surround a cartoon of a bearded white dude in a T-shirt reading RANCHERS’ LIVES MATTER. I don’t believe Burris shares any of these views, but he does seem to enjoy a problematic equivocality. In a press release for a 2019 show he stated, “I am not interested so much in perceptions of right versus wrong—it’s more about here we are.”
Burris’s sardonic parroting of language continued in pieces culled from the institutional jargon of Lexington’s Eastern State Hospital, the second-oldest US facility for treating psychiatric disorders. In 2006, while looking for a community garden plot, Burris discovered a mass grave dating to the 1970s. It belonged to Eastern State, and he estimated that between four thousand and seven thousand people were buried there. In three works here--And Whose Treatment Needs, We Strive to Make our Services . . . , and Hospital Promises—Burris shifted his aesthetic slightly to include droplet shapes with corporate speak from one of the clinic’s booklets. Unlike the amorphous text streams found in the other drawings, these come off more as free-floating thought bubbles or freaky bits of concrete poetry. Words such as EXCELLENCE, COMPETENT, and THERAPEUTIC stand out—again, the irony is thick.
The show also offered a remarkable congregating between Burris, March head Phillip March Jones, and Summertime cofounders Sophia Cosmadopoulos and Anna Schechter, all of whom focus on bringing people from the neurodiverse community into public discourse. Their goals are similar to those of Creative Growth, the long-standing nonprofit in Oakland, California, that assists artists with disabilities by providing studios, materials, facilities, and other forms of support. And while I don’t know how to square Burris’s years of service with his art, one thing is clear: They’re both animated by an awareness of how severely broken the US is.
— Lauren O’Neill-Butler
Bruce Burris
SUMMERTIME
Bruce Burris’s trippy, caustic, and unruly exhibition of drawings—organized by the curatorial platform March and presented at Summertime, a nonprofit art studio and gallery in Brooklyn—felt timely in its caricaturing of the deeply divided United States. The show opened one day before President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took the oath of office at the Capitol on January 20, 2021, while the nation was still reeling from an unthinkable attack by a violent mob there earlier in the month. The fourteen works on view, all made in 2020, were essentially heralds, announcing that our lives would be inundated with images of the vile Oath Keepers and their repugnant brethren. No joyful tidings here.
Chockablock stacks of ornately rendered words in acrylic, tempera, watercolor, marker, graphite, and spray paint radiated from each twenty-two-by-fifteen-inch sheet of paper. When starting a new drawing, Burris lays out his larger foundational writing first, then embellishes the spaces around it with other phrases and decorative flourishes, building up an unstable architecture bit by bit. Inside the borders of some of the pieces was an enclosed sea of tiny, nearly unreadable script in black pen. Take Labor Day, where the bright and buzzy name of Republican schlock rocker Ted Nugent is getting suffocated by phrases you might hear from his supporters, such as SAVE OUR JOBS, YOU CANNOT ROB US OF OUR HERITAGE, and WORKING FAMILIES ARE UNDER ATTACK.
As an artist, Burris has been producing in this aesthetic vein—protest posters gone berserk—since the 1980s. But he also has an inspiring history as an activist. For more than twenty-five years he’s been an advocate for neurodiverse artists and has founded several art centers devoted to cultural equity in Lexington, Kentucky, and in Corvallis, Oregon, where he now lives. However, this enduring commitment clashes with his artistic labor, which is all about insurrection. At times, his wild sampling of right-wing discourse can be downright nauseating. Guns Save Lives was the lone work here reduced to a palette of black, white, and blue, the colors of the Thin Blue Line flag, a sign of “support for law enforcement” and opposition to Black Lives Matter. Shrill proclamations, including PATRIOTS PREPARE and STAND FOR YOUR FLAG, surround a cartoon of a bearded white dude in a T-shirt reading RANCHERS’ LIVES MATTER. I don’t believe Burris shares any of these views, but he does seem to enjoy a problematic equivocality. In a press release for a 2019 show he stated, “I am not interested so much in perceptions of right versus wrong—it’s more about here we are.”
Burris’s sardonic parroting of language continued in pieces culled from the institutional jargon of Lexington’s Eastern State Hospital, the second-oldest US facility for treating psychiatric disorders. In 2006, while looking for a community garden plot, Burris discovered a mass grave dating to the 1970s. It belonged to Eastern State, and he estimated that between four thousand and seven thousand people were buried there. In three works here--And Whose Treatment Needs, We Strive to Make our Services . . . , and Hospital Promises—Burris shifted his aesthetic slightly to include droplet shapes with corporate speak from one of the clinic’s booklets. Unlike the amorphous text streams found in the other drawings, these come off more as free-floating thought bubbles or freaky bits of concrete poetry. Words such as EXCELLENCE, COMPETENT, and THERAPEUTIC stand out—again, the irony is thick.
The show also offered a remarkable congregating between Burris, March head Phillip March Jones, and Summertime cofounders Sophia Cosmadopoulos and Anna Schechter, all of whom focus on bringing people from the neurodiverse community into public discourse. Their goals are similar to those of Creative Growth, the long-standing nonprofit in Oakland, California, that assists artists with disabilities by providing studios, materials, facilities, and other forms of support. And while I don’t know how to square Burris’s years of service with his art, one thing is clear: They’re both animated by an awareness of how severely broken the US is.
— Lauren O’Neill-Butler
LYRICAL MAGICAL HISTORY TOUR
by Patrick Collier, HFF Catalog
What is the optimal environment for viewing a Bruce Burris collage/assemblage? In a gallery you can just stand back as one normally would and let yourself be drawn into his buoyant brilliance of colors, the bright-shiny psychedelic eye candy. It will be an immersive experience, almost overwhelming. You’ll be there for hours.
Instead, I would argue for experiencing his work on some unhurried weekend morning as you slowly stroll around your house. A cup of coffee in hand, you stop in front of your large-scale Burris piece to closely examine the details of a quadrant of the work. I liken it to a time when music only came on LP albums. Excited with your purchase of a band’s new release, after putting the vinyl on the turntable, you’d pour over the album sleeve’s cover art and lyrics. And not just one time. Burris’ artworks require such involvement.
We are said to like art that challenges, and if that is the case, it would follow that a deeper dive brings reward. This is certainly the case with Burris. He inundates us with snippets of conversations, headlines and captions, and photographs, not to mention drawings, baubles and weaves, more to demonstrate the complexity rather than cacophony of a pressing environmental or societal malady. More urgent than manic, his end result is not a diatribe or screed. Instead, we shall call his works of art “conversations,” and these conversations Burris presents are necessarily multifarious and multifaceted.
The vernacular voice he adopts, as well as photographs he cuts out of magazines and his use of art materials from a hobby store, signal the degree of humility with which he approaches a given topic, whether it be issues of class or the treatment of people with mental disabilities. Like many people of a certain age whose formative years (the 60s) were spent during a time of social uprising, Burris brings that time’s idealism with him into maturity. Yet he is careful to avoid any particular ideological echo chamber, instead applying a rigor in his thought and deed, and does so because he wants to thoroughly represent both sides of an issue, all to ask a bigger historical question: How did we get to this point?
For his Hippiewannacigarette (2019), Burris draws on his own history growing up in Delaware and blends it into a timeline that includes the recent history of Oregon. A large hand is central to the piece, yet it is less a hand than a stage for a series of vignettes. On the palm we find Jesus wearing a crown of thorns and what appears to be a t-shirt that says, “Shrug it off.” From a speech bubble he commands, “Light up.” Surrounding this image of the Christ is some commentary: “This Dude Sure Knows His Wounds;” and above that, “one sad Ol Rock n Roll Opry UHHH.” The thumb is garlanded and is attached with velcro. The pointer finger proclaims “This Space tis Your Reason.” The middle finger is cut away, showing bone, and is topped off with a smaller red, white and blue peace sign hand as one would have seen on a bumper sticker in the Sixties. Portions of this same finger read “Ol Bandaid” and “Fuck ya Orygun The Curtin Has Risen.” The “opry” reference (Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ, Superstar) as well as a rising “curtin” let one know that this piece is indeed intended to be like a rock opera, and the four long-haired, cigarette-smoking dudes who form the elongated ring finger could very well be cast/band members.
From there, Hippiewannacigarette explodes, both visually and textually. To transcribe all of the text that is on this particular piece would put me way beyond the word count I am allowed, but I can tell you my take on the piece. It is a story about a Vietnam veteran who falls on hard times, and who, like so many others, falls through gaping cracks in our society. Yet, Hippiewannacigarette is just one chapter in Burris’ body of work about the divide between the entitled and the victims all caught up in
a greedy, uncaring world.
Burris’ work is ebullient in the fullest sense, both exuberant and boiling, which may be a wholly appropriate response to the intensity of issues like mental illness, mountaintop removal for coal mining, and the Malheur Occupation. Absent a society that seems able to find a collective will to find remedies, an alternative is to respond, transcendentally, with a panacea of psychedelia. And in that it is a familiar headspace for the seekers among us, whether charismatic evangelical or diehard hippie,
it may just work.
Hallie Ford Foundation Fellowship
Bruce is a painter – in a non-traditional sense. He is a collage artist. He is psychedelic 60’s. His sculpture is literally off-the-wall. Above all, he is a storyteller. His canvasses and papers expand beyond a normal form, drawing the eye to inquire about its message.
Bruce has flown under the radar for decades. As one reference noted: “he is an endlessly brilliant guy but hasn’t always gotten a fair shake in places that were not responsive to the provocation he is capable of. The South, from where he came, can be a devastatingly punishing place. Now that he has moved to the other side of the country, there is a lot more energy around his practice.”
His practice has begun to flourish after a period of stepping back. He expresses multiple perspectives of a conflict into a single work – that’s his forte - whether it be coal mining or forestry or the recent Malheur Refuge stand-off. His is an immediate impulse to recognize and communicate the plight of communities, which are left behind as industries that rely on extracting natural resources move on.
The works are often complicated stories and he gives the time and space to communicate the back and forth of conversations taking place. They are saying: “Stop, Stop, Listen to what I am saying.” Given the times we live in this is an incredibly important approach to take. Someone trying to make work that is not polarizing, which is what really sucks you in to begin with.
Bruce’s content has always been about the issues of place – where he lives and the strife that is embedded in the locality. The issues may change over time, but he seems always to focus on issues that affect working people. He exhibits a high level of craft and corresponding ideas - really visual meanderings about the effects of social, political, big business on certain regions in our country. They are always gutsy in content and beautifully rendered.
He has always had a very specific aesthetic and trajectory in terms of his ideas. His work continues to get increasingly ambitious and complex as time goes by. That’s why you see the words “in progress” noted on the wall texts adjacent to some of his works in today’s exhibition – because they may never be totally finished because the conversations continue.
Another reference noted: “Support of the nature of a HFF is important because it takes so long to enter into the institutional psyche. It makes this type of support that much more essential. In the long trajectory of history there ought to be some significant footnotes for artists who are working on issues that others aren’t dealing with, particularly those who approach it with visual sophistication, like Bruce.”
Bruce’s art may be all-consuming – yet he finds time to found and now directs several non-profit organizations in his adopted community of Corvallis. The intersections are so many in a small community and Bruce is at the apex, working with and supporting his fellow artists, many of whom are considered to have disabilities. He makes sure they get galleries showing their work all over the country. He’s always organizing something that calls to his community – his is an indefatigable spirit, undaunted by challenges and lack of resources.
A reference noted: “He is not an “outsider” artist, but his work does stand out in the art world, which can be very unforgiving. He is unique, a word that can’t and shouldn’t often be used.”
Art Issues. San Francisco e-MAIL
Mark Van Proyen
Bruce Burris at Braunstein/Quay Gallery
… This kind of schizophrenic religiosity is brilliantly captured in the work of Bruce Burris, who now lives in Lexington, Kentucky after having attended art school in the Bay Area. The Northern California influence in Burris’s work is easy to pick out in his exhibition “White Boys!” a large array of recent paintings, drawings, and sculpture. It resides in the obstreperous maximalism of shape, image and bright color that we might associate with the work of Roy Deforest or Viola Frey. Undulate patterns of brightly colored dots proliferate, as do ornate beadwork and cartoonish vignettes featuring “bleeding Jesus” and other stock characters displaying a host of peculiar quirks. Where Burris’s works differ is in the complex culture that they reflect, for he has gone to great lengths to scavenge telling pieces of text and script from his adopted bluegrass home.
Included is the quasi literate religious homily of both genteel and viscous types, the kind of declarations that rednecks and hillbillies proudly display in their backyards so that passing motorists can be reminded that “the end is near’. Burris pulls off a neat trick in the way that he re-paints the overdone profusion of signage to appear as some Ozark tourist trap, perhaps a clapboard Las Vegas reconfigured into some cracker’s dysfunctional miniature golf course. This profusion comes across as a typographical speaking in polychrome tongues (think Jed Clampett on methamphetamine), and it is rich in moments of riotous hilarity. But this hilarity is in touch with a kind of poignancy and pathos, for these works bring us to close to the atavistic sense of mortality of their original inspirations, suggesting that the fool’s paradise of homegrown religion is not quite so full of fools as we might wish to believe.
Mark Van Proyen
Bruce Burris at Braunstein/Quay Gallery
… This kind of schizophrenic religiosity is brilliantly captured in the work of Bruce Burris, who now lives in Lexington, Kentucky after having attended art school in the Bay Area. The Northern California influence in Burris’s work is easy to pick out in his exhibition “White Boys!” a large array of recent paintings, drawings, and sculpture. It resides in the obstreperous maximalism of shape, image and bright color that we might associate with the work of Roy Deforest or Viola Frey. Undulate patterns of brightly colored dots proliferate, as do ornate beadwork and cartoonish vignettes featuring “bleeding Jesus” and other stock characters displaying a host of peculiar quirks. Where Burris’s works differ is in the complex culture that they reflect, for he has gone to great lengths to scavenge telling pieces of text and script from his adopted bluegrass home.
Included is the quasi literate religious homily of both genteel and viscous types, the kind of declarations that rednecks and hillbillies proudly display in their backyards so that passing motorists can be reminded that “the end is near’. Burris pulls off a neat trick in the way that he re-paints the overdone profusion of signage to appear as some Ozark tourist trap, perhaps a clapboard Las Vegas reconfigured into some cracker’s dysfunctional miniature golf course. This profusion comes across as a typographical speaking in polychrome tongues (think Jed Clampett on methamphetamine), and it is rich in moments of riotous hilarity. But this hilarity is in touch with a kind of poignancy and pathos, for these works bring us to close to the atavistic sense of mortality of their original inspirations, suggesting that the fool’s paradise of homegrown religion is not quite so full of fools as we might wish to believe.
Bruce Burris; We Will Someday, Someday We Will, whitehot magazine;
Phillip March Jones In Conversation with Bruce Burris
Bruce Burris is presenting a new body of work entitled We Will Someday, Someday We Will at Institute 193, a non-profit contemporary art space in Lexington, Kentucky. The colorful ensemble of paintings, drawings, sculptures and interactive installation directly addresses mountaintop removal, the politics of rural community centers and the role of protest in the resolution of pressing environmental problems. These issues have traditionally been treated as geographically specific concerns but are increasingly viewed as essential aspects of the larger "green movement." Burris, a native of Delaware, is working with this material as an interested observer, employing an established aesthetic to further these broadening conversations visually and intellectually. The show at Institute 193 serves as a re-introduction of Burris’ work after a 10-year, self-described “hiatus” from art making.
PJ: You essentially stopped making artwork 10 years ago. What made you stop?
BB: I was unable to find any long-term, regional support structure – patrons, grants, museums, art centers. I sort of ran out of steam.
PJ: You have, however, recently begun making work again.
BB: The regional issues of Kentucky are rich, fascinating, incredible - begging to be explored. Environmental issues like mountaintop removal, political issues, socio-economics, racial tension and identity. I wanted to re-engage with the material. And, quite frankly, this show represents an opportunity.
PJ: You are one of the few contemporary artists I know creating work about mountaintop removal, politics of rural community centers, etc. – but you aren’t from Kentucky – let alone Appalachia…
BB: I’m not sure I’ve ever really even been to Appalachia. The parts of the country that we traditionally identify as “Appalachian” anyways, but their politics and culture have helped form the identity of Lexington.
PJ: Are you saying that Lexington is close enough?
BB: Not necessarily. I think that the issues warrant explanation, and I don’t think that artists have to be from a particular region to explore the issues that really affect us all. The larger culture is paying more attention to environmental issues, but contemporary artists, specifically those in the South, aren’t dealing with these issues in ways that are satisfying to me. Artists are saying a lot by not dealing with this material – but I don’t want to risk suggesting what it may be.
PJ: Your work is extremely charged – both with detail and written content. Are you providing “crutches” for the viewer?
BB: I have always like signs. Information. Pamphlets. I like short bursts of colorful information. Bulletin boards. My visual material is often structured as scaffolding supported by language. Writing is the common element in everything I make. The protesters, the bulletin board, the drawings are essentially text. The figures and landscapes are more like supporting actors.
PJ: Your show at Institute 193 is your first exhibition in ten years – are you excited or nervous?
BB: I wouldn’t say that I am particularly nervous. In my view, a lot of this work is about things I hope to expand and take outside of the region. The bulletin board installation, in particular, has the capacity to grow and evolve both in scope and scale. The piece functions as a self-contained community center. Writers come in and perform with the material. School groups can join in. I would like for it to grow and sponsor events, soccer teams, stream clean ups. It’s about empowering people to create and support activity in all its forms.
PJ: Wait… How can an art piece sponsor anything?
BB: Why not? Depending on the particular format of the show, this piece could grow into anything related to the larger community in which it appears. I have spent most of my life working in community centers and have seen things evolve quickly into projects, events, sponsorships, whatever…
PJ: Your large-format drawings are entitled, Are Ye One with Stoner Creek – Is that a real place?
BB: Stoner Creek is a 99-mile stream that winds through Central Kentucky. It can be an idyllic setting for boating and other times turns into, literally, a drainage ditch. I love the idea of grinding extremely local material into my larger body of work. There are plenty of people in Lexington who don’t know that Stoner Creek exists. It’s a way to alert people to our own lack of awareness of the places and things that provide for us. We don’t know our own infrastructure or how it works. Where does our water come from? Our electricity?
PJ: Our artists?
BB: Exactly.
We Will Someday. Someday We Will opens on January 14, 2010 at Institute 193 in Lexington, Kentucky.
Phillip March Jones is an artist, writer and curator based in Lexington, Kentucky. He is the Creative Director of Institute 193, a non-profit contemporary art space.
www.institute193.org
Bruce Burris is a visual artist and a community activist. He is the founder of ELandF Gallery, a mobile arts space in Lexington that stages events, installations and other interventions related to the political and artistic climate of the city. Burris also co-founded Latitude Artist Community, a visual arts program for disabled artists.
Thunder-Sky Inc. Exhibits (Review)
Different means, same end for two new shows
By Matt Morris
City Beat, Cincinnati
Critic's Pick
For those viewers willing to go along for the ride, the two intermixed exhibitions now at Thunder-Sky Inc. are post-psychedelic trips into alternative ways of processing thought. The innovative Northside gallery has shows featuring artists interested in outsider or folk art.
On the one side is Bruce Burris’ Welcome to the Lonely Mountain Community Center, and on the other is Aaron Oliver Wood’s Rainy Day. Both artists embed their inquiries and interests in swirling patterns and acidic color schemes, but from there on out they diverge as each goes deeper into their own fantasy realms.
Burris currently lives and works in Lexington, after studying at Nasson College in Maine and the San Francisco Art Institute. He has been exhibiting across the country and has been honored with a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship and an NEA Fellowship.
Burris’ works make mention of the titular community center, which is in fact a fictitious construction through which the artist processes his aesthetic concerns as well as his real-life political and social protests. It is a meta-narrative, outfitted with characters, churches and organized protests against big corporation opponents. In our present political climate (think of Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally in D.C. at the beginning of the fall and the Jon Stewart-led “Rally to Restore Sanity” several months later), what the artist is showing looks as much like the real world we are living in as the hippie-era protests that seem to have inspired him.
On the gallery’s back wall is “Bulletin Board,” a large, cluttered display topped with the header “Welcome to Lonely Mountain Community Center ~ John 1:17.” Artist-created flyers, announcements and sign-up sheets are pinned, overlapping all over the bulletin board (pictured above). When setting about to invent a world, it is striking that Burris did not offer a utopian vision: Notices from drug-support groups suggest a rampant meth problem in the Lonely Mountain community, alongside house foreclosures, babysitters for working moms and efforts to resist mountaintop removal in the area.
There are full-scale protest signs that accompany the community board, all of which are rainbows of colored stripes and spots and express heated outcries for the preservation of mountain ranges. One reads, “Time to fuckin’ stop our bleeding mountaintop.”
One gallery wall is scattered with a number of paintings on panel that re-create some of the posters and flyers on the bulletin board across the room. Even though we ideologically separate paintings from posters, Burris implies that in our overly developed culture, rife with semiotics, the two are fundamentally the same thing now. That is, paintings are cultural signifiers that communicate the political, economic and personal conditions that surrounded their making. His poster painting that begins “Conflict Management Tools” — scripted in varying doodled fonts — is straightforward and suggests that art is just such a tool to aid in conflict resolution.
Wood, originally from Florida, is based in Cincinnati. He holds a bachelor’s degree in graphic design from Northern Kentucky University and has worked extensively in the area as an illustrator, an exhibiting artist and even the host of a Psychedelic music show for community radio station WAIF (88.3 FM).
His drawings, prints, posters and papier-maché objects evoke Freak Folk, Indie Rock sensibilities through sinuous, nebulous patterns that pile onto themselves to set the scene. One long wall is hung with nine oversized works on paper that, read together, tell a sad love story. Two abstract portraits in colored pencil and washes of paint — “Aquarian 1” and “Aquarian 2” — are separated by six prints collectively titled “Tear Drops.”
One assumes that the thin-lipped, shorthaired character is a handsome young man; his counterpart has the wavy locks popular among female hipsters nowadays. The male is an entrancing pile of violets, tawny browns and red-pinks. His female counterpart is painted in noticeably somber hues, wreathed in a smoky black wash, and her eyes are silver-leafed into a vacant expression.
They might be Adam and Eve, except they aren’t banished from a garden. Rather, they seem to be banished from one another. The “Tear Drops” prints depict puddles, roughly hewn concentric circles that could be a minefield of black holes separating the two characters. Pedestals placed almost in front of the portraits display “Eyeball Space Helmet” and “Helmet,” both battered, playful headgears that suggest armament and escape.
Wood’s tender “Butterfly Chart” is a large sheet filled with ornamental renderings of butterflies that have been color-coded in blue, green and orange, as well as several in the reds and pinks of meat and skin. Beneath one winged creature, two tribal-looking figures huddle around a campfire, suggesting that the butterfly has been conjured from smoke, magic and memory. Just the invocation of collecting the remains of such a beautiful insect suggests loss. This is a theme that refers back to Burris’ work, with its concerns about coal miners ravaging the environment, and thus connects the two artists.
Both of them bring lots of energy, imagery and creativity into their engagements with conflicts. In Burris’ case, they are social comment; in Wood’s, they are detached, internalized imagery seemingly culled from a fantasy of escaping heartbreak by pulling on a helmet and launching into space.
Jane McCafferty
NEA/SAF Fellowship
Burris' creative practices, like his politics, are complex, but without the cool irony that often accompanies an understanding of complexity. They are the works of an artist fully engaged, enraged, and committed to the world. This ultimately makes them hopeful works of art. Burris obviously understands the role of language in powerlessness, and knows a dictionary can be as important as a coat.
Because he believes in hope as a necessity, his works are never so despairing that one can't find messages of light in the darkness. These hopeful notes are so painfully believable because they exist within symbols of hopelessness, suggesting that good cannot be cleanly separated from evil, that if there are answers, they are not easy ones.
Burris speaks of the connection between the empowered and the powerless, the rich and the poor, the happy and the despairing. Everyone is implicated here, and everyone is invited.
"Jed Clampett's Unlucky Cousins:
Hillbilly Stereotypes and Kentucky Culture"
By DAVID MINTON, KENTUCKY CORRESPONDING EDITOR FOR dialogue
dialogue
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER, 1997
Bruce Burris is a Delaware native who moved to Lexington about five years ago. His '' Kentuckycycle"--an ever-changing installation also known as "DIDWEDOTHISTOOYEW" deals with issues of cultural identity. In particular, Burris zeroes in on the cultural identity associated with Kentucky's Appalachian region--the eastern section of the state through which the Appalachian mountain range runs.
The artist admits that he has never strayed from the relatively affluent and beautiful central part of the state to visit the comparatively "economically depressed" Appalachian region. Rather, he has chosen to base his ideas about eastern Kentucky on mainstream materials, images, literature, and quotations that have molded the stereotypes we have today. Since he has never been to the region to experience the people and realities firsthand, the viewer can be sure that the ideas in Burris' head come exclusively from various marketers of the cultural identity he addresses.
"Kentuckycycle" is a barrage of images and words: drunken mountain men holding fishing poles and playing fiddles, fat hags with rags wrapped around their heads smoking corncob pipes and holding shotguns, and big-breasted Daisy Mae types posing and posturing. Souvenirs such as 'coon" tails,' Mountain Taffy Logs," and 'Hillbilly Shot Mugs" (made of wood and bark) line gift shop shelves. Vehicles resembling the one on "The Beverly Hillbillies" are made of wood and painted, festooned with sails and banners that say things like 'Here comes Truble." Burris also includes triangular flags that sport images of tree stumps and trophies with the words "Kentucky is O.K.
The paintings are packed full of words, most spelled phonetically so that we catch the conscious misspellings as well as the dialectical pronunciations. It's pretty insulting and degrading, overall, and that is obviously the point.
The show is heavy on irony. The twist is that Burris doesn't just go after the sick minds that produce those 'emblems of Appalachian culture, he also points a finger at the people who find humor in those depictions. His installation mimics Kentucky's state park gift shops and other retail outfits that profit from the "Hillbilly" image. At the same time, those stores, perhaps unwittingly, spark or reinforce the notion that such people and conditions exist. Tourists buy the items, possibly thinking they represent an actual portion of Kentucky's population.
Burris goes after the natives of Appalachia who find some kind of pride in the bumpkin identity with which they have been saddled: a pride they demonstrate by waving confederate flags and plastering their cars with self-derogatory bumper stickers. These same people, Burris alleges, are proud of their "famous feuds." He addresses the region's academic institutions, including Berea College, where "Kentucky crafts" such as broom making and basket weaving take precedence over a broader liberal arts curriculum or the preparation for an upscale professional career. He wonders why Morehead State University (about 60 miles east of Lexington) has spent so much time, effort, and money collecting, promoting, and marketing work thought to be quintessential Appalachian art and craft: roosters made of tree branches and evangelical scenes painted on pine chests. Morehead's Kentucky Folk Art Center exhibits such items (again, reinforcing the "hillbilly" stereotype) and sends them to other states for exhibition. Burris wonders aloud why Appalshop--an organization based in southeastern Kentucky and respected for turning out documentaries about the region--never makes films about Appalachian artists who work with high-tech materials and media, produce cutting-edge art, or deal with hot political topics, relevant gender issues, or current socio-racial concerns. Burris wants to know why Appalshop prefers to focus exclusively on cane whittlers and gourd painters.
"Kentuckycycle" is a blatant parody that raises questions including why Appalachians are pictured in the collective consciousness as different from the rest of Kentucky's People and why Appalachia is thought of as a world apart from the one in which the rest of us live.
Appalachian people are generally considered disadvantaged, isolated, and somehow stuck in another era. Burris says that this conception--Appalachians being like Jed Clampett's unlucky cousins--underlies marketing ploys, research, journalism, scholarly study, and proposed solutions to social, economic, and political problems.
His installation presents the stereotype, in all of its crude glory, with all of its ramifications, as an impetus to make you, the viewer, ask questions based on your reactions to the work. Are you repulsed by the stereotyping or do you find it humorous. Does it make you feel superior, ashamed, or unmoved? Do you find it curious or take it seriously as a detrimental thing? If you are from Appalachia, do you identify with the character types shown? If you are not from Appalachia, do you believe a population like the one depicted in this exhibition really exists or ever did exist?
To reinforce his own ideas, Burris included Christina Godsey's work in the show. Godsey is a native of Edmonton, Kentucky: a town so small it doesn't have a stoplight, unless you count the flashing light at the four-way stop where the two main roads cross. Her father is from the United States and her mother is from the Philippines. Godsey calls herself a 'Philbilly'.
Her work is rooted in autobiography. In one series, she uses a photograph of her own face repeatedly in order to break down the constituent parts of her racial Identity. Each photograph is emblazoned with a percentage: "33% Japanese," "8% Chinese," "3% African American." Each photograph is altered with paint so that Godsey's appearance and costume can be linked to a racial stereotype. In the "33% Japanese" piece, for example, she appears as a geisha. In the work that proclaims her "25% Native American," her hair is darkened and braided and a teepee is placed in the background. You get the idea.
In a related set of works, racial slurs are used in conjunction with the artist's face. Godsey mentions that a number of slurs have been said to her, including "You know I was kidding when I called you a Chink" and "What? Ydon’t speak your native tongue?"
The third component of Godsey's work is a box filled with photographs of people from her hometown. The irony here is in the fact that the artist-subject doesn't took at all like a "typical" Kentuckian. She has cut the photographs up and rewoven them in order to make a checkerboard of her face, putting cultural identity and stereotyping into perspective.
So there you have it. One artist is a first generation "Philbilly" whose outward appearance suggests that she comes from another part of the world. The other is an outsider to Kentucky--he has painted himself as a goofy camera-toting tourist more than once--trying to examine a cultural persona and understand it through second hand information.
What both artists are calling into question is the legitimacy of any form of cultural identity. Godsey's depictions of so-called "traditional dress" or any form of traditional appearance demonstrate that racial purity is a myth and cultural identity cannot be clearly linked to racial identity. Burris' work shows the absurdity of stereotyping and raises the questions of how stereotyping is generated and perpetuated and by whom.
The artist behind the artists
By Tom Eblen - Herald-Leader columnist
Bruce Burris is best known in Lexington for helping other people create art — and for pushing the boundaries of what art is and who artists are.
He directs (with Crystal Bader) the Latitude Artist Community on Saunier Street, which for nearly a decade has helped people with disabilities express themselves through visual art. Latitude artists' work has been displayed at galleries in New York and Paris, France.
Burris started ELandF Gallery, a "small-projects accelerator" for art in public spaces. It has sent poets to read in nursing homes and on LexTran buses. And it has paid small honoraria to people who wrote winning essays about why they wanted to watch clouds or read a book while sitting in a streetside parking space.
At the height of the controversy over Dudley Webb's now-stalled CentrePointe development, Burris paid performance artists to publicly "mourn" the demolition of the block's old buildings and to walk Main Street as "town criers," giving dramatic readings of a defensive speech that Webb made to the Urban County Council.
Away from Lexington, Burris has gained notoriety for his own art. He has had solo exhibitions in San Francisco, Philadelphia and cities in California and Michigan, but never in Lexington. Until now.
"Nobody really knows about that aspect of his personality," said Phillip March Jones, who organized Burris' first solo show in a decade, which opened Thursday at Institute 193 and continues through Feb. 20.
Jones opened Institute 193 last fall at 193 North Limestone. It is a little gallery with big ambitions: to showcase the work of this region's unsung contemporary artists.
"Everything with Bruce is about Latitude or ELandF, but it's never about him. ... His own art never gets presented," Jones said. "And, for me, it's some of the most interesting stuff he does."
The show is called We Will Someday, Someday We Will. The name was inspired by this season of New Year's resolutions, when we all promise to become better people.
Burris' sculptures, drawings, paintings and installation pieces use humor, irony and parody to comment on and raise questions about community dynamics and cultural stereotypes. He wants his art to promote activism and awareness of regional issues including poverty and mountaintop-removal coal mining. His art isn't intended as decoration; he wants it to make viewers think.
One piece, Welcome to Lonely Mountain Community Center, is a bulletin board filled with fictional news and notices that speak to issues, concerns and cultural conflicts in contemporary small-town Appalachia.
Burris is as much a storyteller as an artist. He densely weaves words and messages into his paintings and drawings, some of which are reminiscent of funk-art album covers from the 1970s.
"What really carries the work is this text," Jones said. "He's dealing with the very problems we're dealing with every day. These are serious issues, but he deals with them in a visually lighthearted way to get people into them."
I met Burris for lunch at Third Street Stuff on a cold, snowy day. The first thing he wanted to do, before talking about himself, was to show off drawings and paintings by Latitude artists on the wall behind our table.
Burris, 54, grew up in Wilmington, Del., seeing art in everyday life. His mother was constantly taking him to museums and cultural events, "which, of course, I didn't appreciate at the time," he says.
He also was influenced by a boyhood neighbor, the famous artist and illustrator Frank Schoonover, who was well into his 80s but still painting and teaching. "He had an open studio where neighborhood kids could wander in," Burris said.
"I grew up feeling like the visual arts were an approachable thing," said Burris, who studied at San Francisco Art Institute. "But the better way for me to make art is not in an isolated environment. Collaboration and community and support; it's a very natural thing for me."
That belief, and a public service ethic picked up while attending Quaker schools, led him to a career that has combined art, community and social work — working with homeless and abused children in San Francisco and with disabled artists in Kentucky.
Burris moved to Lexington 16 years ago with his wife, Robynn Pease, who came to the University of Kentucky to earn a doctorate. She is now UK's director of work life, teaches sociology and social work, and was elected last year as staff representative on the university board of trustees. They live near Southland Drive.
Originally, Burris thought he would be here three or four years then move back to San Francisco. "So I stored all my unimportant stuff in a friend's garage," he said. "I hope he's had a big yard sale by now."
After his last solo show a decade ago at a major San Francisco gallery, Burris said he ran out of steam and stopped creating work for several years. He resumed only recently, sparked by concern about mountaintop-removal mining and other issues he saw around him.
Burris' art, like the projects he sponsors through ELandF, are reactions to what he sees around him.
"I like all the projects I've done, but I know in my heart that they're not innovative enough," he said. "I don't always feel like taking risks in this environment. You won't see people taking these risks here; it's a small town. But we should take risks."
By MEREDITH REDLIN
THE SOUTHERN QUARTERLY
Ya shore cain't miss 'em--the central crude icons in their cartoon glory dominate the drawings of Bruce Burris in these pieces from the "trail a fears" installation. The caricatured people are ugly, dirty, ignorant and, above all, familiar. They are the stuff of jokes--the Daisy Mae-s and worn-out hags, Jed the moonshiner and his violent, feudin' cousins--and they are some of the oldest images of Appalachian America. The "trail a fears" is also Route 23, the road along which these images are crowded, and along which dreams of escape from poverty can find factory jobs in the north, if only the people were able. What has made these people funny is their poverty, the apparent inability to deal with the modern world when they are driven by their poverty into it, their mindless violence and love of drink; what has made them funny is their worthlessness which oddly bestows worth on all of us who are not them.
Yet, for all their familiarity, it's also a little jarring to see these images outside of cheap truck stop joke books, where they normally reside. It feels, culturally, like a step backward--a glorification of the crudity of the stereotypes, rather than a refutation of them. It's nicer to think that such unsubtle images of class and cultural hierarchy in America had been left behind, obscured by the many institutions which have been fighting these same Appalachian stereotypes uitl such success. And yet if that success is exactly what these drawings are calling into question, for the institutions are represented here as well. The Appalshop cameras are focused on the cartoons of people, stills and outhouses. The words of William Goodell Frost, president of Berea College untill 1920, "...the aim should be to make them [Appalachian students] intelligent without making them sophisticated" wind in and around the many other words which have been employed to fight the cartoons. Despite the linguistic analysis of mountain speech, the careful manufacturing and marketing of traditional crafts, the planned revival of folk art and ways-despite all these words which crowd the drawings, the lingering images of hillbilly heaven have not been undone.
The drawings in "trail a fears" fall heavily on the rural/urban cultural hierarchy, and reveal its pervasive durability. In their recent book, Knowing Your Place: Cultural Hierarchy and Rural Identity, Barbara Ching and Gerald Creed comment that to be rural is always less than to be urban, and "being down south is being at the bottom of the cultural heap." (14) The stereotypical image of the Appalachian people is not overcome by the intellectual work issued from universities and arts organizations. All their effort to define hillbilly cultures do not protect those cultures and their people from being at the bottom of modem culture. Instead, like the tourist-driven Hillbilly festivals, these images carry on a new, commodified existence as curious and antiquated objects of study, of difference, and of continued unworthiness.
Burris' view is legitimately that of the outsider. Legitimate because of his emphasis on including all images of the Appalachian experience, whether crude or sophisticated. Outsider because he's not "from here" and makes no pretences to be. But the drawings which comprise the "trail a fears" are not about the real life of Appalachia, just the opposite. They are about the enduring fictions, the everlasting inequalities, the American bogey men and women which ensure a better social position for the rest of us.
THE SOUTHERN QUARTERLY
Ya shore cain't miss 'em--the central crude icons in their cartoon glory dominate the drawings of Bruce Burris in these pieces from the "trail a fears" installation. The caricatured people are ugly, dirty, ignorant and, above all, familiar. They are the stuff of jokes--the Daisy Mae-s and worn-out hags, Jed the moonshiner and his violent, feudin' cousins--and they are some of the oldest images of Appalachian America. The "trail a fears" is also Route 23, the road along which these images are crowded, and along which dreams of escape from poverty can find factory jobs in the north, if only the people were able. What has made these people funny is their poverty, the apparent inability to deal with the modern world when they are driven by their poverty into it, their mindless violence and love of drink; what has made them funny is their worthlessness which oddly bestows worth on all of us who are not them.
Yet, for all their familiarity, it's also a little jarring to see these images outside of cheap truck stop joke books, where they normally reside. It feels, culturally, like a step backward--a glorification of the crudity of the stereotypes, rather than a refutation of them. It's nicer to think that such unsubtle images of class and cultural hierarchy in America had been left behind, obscured by the many institutions which have been fighting these same Appalachian stereotypes uitl such success. And yet if that success is exactly what these drawings are calling into question, for the institutions are represented here as well. The Appalshop cameras are focused on the cartoons of people, stills and outhouses. The words of William Goodell Frost, president of Berea College untill 1920, "...the aim should be to make them [Appalachian students] intelligent without making them sophisticated" wind in and around the many other words which have been employed to fight the cartoons. Despite the linguistic analysis of mountain speech, the careful manufacturing and marketing of traditional crafts, the planned revival of folk art and ways-despite all these words which crowd the drawings, the lingering images of hillbilly heaven have not been undone.
The drawings in "trail a fears" fall heavily on the rural/urban cultural hierarchy, and reveal its pervasive durability. In their recent book, Knowing Your Place: Cultural Hierarchy and Rural Identity, Barbara Ching and Gerald Creed comment that to be rural is always less than to be urban, and "being down south is being at the bottom of the cultural heap." (14) The stereotypical image of the Appalachian people is not overcome by the intellectual work issued from universities and arts organizations. All their effort to define hillbilly cultures do not protect those cultures and their people from being at the bottom of modem culture. Instead, like the tourist-driven Hillbilly festivals, these images carry on a new, commodified existence as curious and antiquated objects of study, of difference, and of continued unworthiness.
Burris' view is legitimately that of the outsider. Legitimate because of his emphasis on including all images of the Appalachian experience, whether crude or sophisticated. Outsider because he's not "from here" and makes no pretences to be. But the drawings which comprise the "trail a fears" are not about the real life of Appalachia, just the opposite. They are about the enduring fictions, the everlasting inequalities, the American bogey men and women which ensure a better social position for the rest of us.