Lowry Burgess

Lowry Burgess is an internationally renowned conceptual and environmental artist and educator. He has been an educator for over forty five years and is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University where he is a Distinguished Fellow in the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry. As the former Dean of the College of Fine Arts he has founded and administered numerous departments and projects at the institutional level. Burgess has also served as coordinator of the Graduate Program at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Lowry first received education at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. From there, he continued his studies at the University of Pennsylvania and at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

Lowry Burgess has achieved a broad range of artistic recognition. For 27 years he has been a Fellow, Senior Consultant and Advisor at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts where he created and directed large collaborative projects and festivals in the US and Europe. He has also been an active member of the National Humanities Facility. After the destruction of the Buddhas in Bamiyan, Afghanistan in 2001, he authored the "Toronto Manifesto, The Right to Human Memory" that received worldwide endorsement. One of the provisions of the Manifesto has led to the creation of a new global value/incentive for the protection of cultural sites throughout the world. This new value/incentive is in the process being implemented by UNESCO and the World Bank., Currently, he has an exhibit, “Forum 61: Lowry Burgess,” on display at Carnegie Mellon University entitled “Vision Flower Portals”. The collection consists of four 15-to-17-foot-tall (4.6 to 5.2 m) canvases strongly emphasizing both the elements of art and the principles of design including, but not limited to, space, symbolism, imagery, texture, and many more. The small collection is only a small part of his larger ongoing artwork entitled Quiet Axis, begun in 1966 This project incorporates eight major points that have been developed around the major features of the planet, expanding to the outer atmosphere where Burgess is closely related. Having an extended involvement with art developed upon space exploration, his 1989 piece entitled “Boundless Cubic Lunar Aperture” became the first piece of art taken into space by NASA aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery STS 29. “Vision Flower Portals” are all based upon a flower, but not the same one; for each flower and painting is its own addition to Quiet Axis. The “Quiet Axis” is a visionary realignment of the earth and heavens so that new relationships may be ordered to establish a new framework for consciousness. Each aspect of the “Quiet Axis” searches for the soul of the world wherein it is neither object nor belief — where darkness and light are one eternal presence.

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