Lilian Thomas Burwell “Soaring”

Berry Campbell

This event has ended.

Berry Campbell presents Lilian Thomas Burwell: Soaring. This exhibition marks the esteemed Maryland-based artist’s first solo exhibition in New York. The exhibition title, Soaring, is an homage to the late Dr. David Driskell’s essay, Soaring with a Painterly Voice, written on the occasion of Burwell’s 1997 survey exhibition at Hampton University Museum, Virginia. Driskell described Burwell’s work as, “transcendental in showing stylistic diversity of earthly beauty and cosmic vision.”

Lilian Thomas Burwell: Soaring, organized by guest curator, Melissa Messina, highlights the dynamic transition in Burwell’s abstract visual language from two-dimensional painterly planes to three-dimensional sculptural forms. Burwell’s paintings from the late 1970s and early 1980s employ a distinctly bold palette and reference organic forms found in natural floral and earthly phenomena. The exhibition centers on the painting Skybound (1984), which marks the first time that the artist cut into her canvas, creating positive and negative space. This pivotal act gave way to Burwell’s examination of form, bringing forth Burwell’s signature style of three-dimensional, painted wall sculpture. These wall sculptures would become the artist’s signature focus for more than two decades.

Lilian Thomas Burwell was born in 1927 in Washington, D.C., and attended Pratt Institute, where she also did her practice teaching. She earned an MFA from Catholic University in 1975. As a master teacher of art in the public schools of Washington, D.C., she designed the pre-secondary school art curriculum before becoming a member of the visual arts faculty at Duke Ellington School of the Arts. She served as board member of the Smithsonian Institution Renwick Alliance from 1989 to 1992, and the Arlington Arts Centers from 1984 to 1987. She was founding and curatorial director of the Alma Thomas Memorial Gallery and curatorial director of the Sumner Museum and Archives in Washington, D.C., from 1981 to 1984. Her published writings include From Painting to Painting as Sculpture: The Journey of Lilian Thomas Burwell (1997) and A Dichotomy of Passion: The Two Masters (2008). Her works are in the collections of the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland; Hampton University Museum; the Phillips Collection; and many others. Her work was included in Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today, an intergenerational exhibition highlighting 21 Black female abstract practitioners that traveled from Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City to The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida in 2017 and 2018. Her life and art, as well as that of her aunt, is the subject of the recent documentary Kindred Spirits: Artists Hilda Wilkinson Brown and Lilian Thomas Burwell, which was an official selection at the San Antonio Black International Film Festival, the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival, and the D.C. Black Film Festival in 2020. Burwell lives and works in Highland Beach, Maryland.

Melissa Messina is an Independent Curator, Curatorial Advisor, and Curator of the Mildred Thompson Estate. For over 15 years, her exhibitions, site-responsive projects, and public programs have been presented in cultural institutions throughout the United States and abroad. She was recently the co-curator of Mildred Thompson, The Atlanta Years, 1986-2003 at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, Georgia (2019), and Mildred Thompson: Against the Grain, at the New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana (2018). In 2017, Messina co-curated Magnetic Fields, Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today, an intergenerational exhibition celebrating abstraction by 21 Black female artists – including Lilian Burwell – that toured from Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. She was formerly the Interim Executive Director and Senior Curator of the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia; the National Program Director for ArtTable, New York; and a founding staff member and then guest curator at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Her research on Black female abstract practitioners has been funded by Creative Time | Warhol Foundation, the Stuart A. Rose Library at Emory University, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas.