James
Burgess
Media:
Painting, Drawing
Studio Location:
43-01 22nd Street, Long Island City, NY 11101
Room/Studio#
407A
Website:
Artist Bio:
James Burgess received a BA from Harvard University in 1962 and was elected a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. He earned an MFA from Cornell University in 1974. He was twice a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, attended Skowhegan, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Ragdale Foundation, and was also a recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He taught at the Parsons School of Design for 25 years.
His paintings and drawings have been shown in solo and group exhibitions in New York, as well as various museums and galleries in the US and abroad. To name a few: the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the American Institute of Arts and Letters, the Everson Museum, the Brooklyn Museum and PS-1. Abroad he has exhibited in one-person shows in Germany and Australia and group shows in China, Italy and Switzerland. His work is in many public and private collections.
Artist Statement:
An experience I prize in art is the spell of the unfamiliar and enigmatic. A mystery and a puzzlement – not a problem to be solved. This, I believe, is achieved by going where I am taken, until an imagined reality in one of its many versions yields proof of the rightness of my instincts in which one simply dwells. My art is primarily the product of such intuitions and not preset concepts. And whatever words I may use in describing it occur only after the fact of its completion, ever mindful of the indigence of language in such endeavors. Ultimately, art wordlessly inheres from within.