A.K. Burns
Associate Professor, Co-Director of MFA Program
A.K. Burns is an interdisciplinary artist who views the body as a contentious domain wherein issues of gender, labor, ecology and sexuality are negotiated. Burns is currently producing Negative Space, a cycle of video-installations that take speculative fiction as a point of departure. The opening episode, A Smeary Spot (2015) debuted at Participant Inc., NY, followed by an exhibition at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, OR, in 2016. The second in this series, titled Living Room (2017) debut at the New Museum, and was subsequently exhibited at Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia in 2018. Additionally in 2018 Burns exhibited a new video work titled Survivors Remorse (2018) at the Harvard Museum and a public sculpture The Dispossessed (2018) at the FRONT International Cleveland Triennial. As a frequent collaborator and advocate for labor issues in the Arts, Burns was a founding member of W.A.G.E (Working Artists in the Great Economy) in 2008. Burns’ works can be found in public collations including the Museum of Modern Art, NY and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA. Burns was also a 2018 NYFA Fellow in Interdisciplinary Arts, a 2016-17 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University as well as a recipient of a 2015 Creative Capital Foundation Visual Arts Award.
