About the Artist

American, 1944–2020

Born and raised in Chicago, her father was a businessman who owned a popular nightclub on the South Side of Chicago. Her mother managed a restaurant.   As a seventh grade public school student in Chicago was selected for a Saturday art curriculum for gifted children at the Art Institute of Chicago. She participated for two years with lectures, projects, and hands-on study. She graduated in Fine Arts at Chicago State University in 1976.She moved east to Princeton in 1978.  She spent one semester at the New School in New York with Chaim Gross in a figure modeling class. She then was accepted as an apprentice at the Johnson Atelier Technical Institute of Sculpture, where she learned mold-making and bronze casting from 1978 to 1980. 1994 Burnette went to RISD for 18 months in pursuit of an MFA. Middle Passages One of the paintings displayed in the gallery (Only For Two) continues her exploration of the Middle Passage theme and is constructed in a way that makes you feel you are looking at cave or temple art. The figures have a rounded, three-dimensional quality and a rough texture, like stone worn by time and the elements. At once primal and enigmatic, this very constructed painting conveys something stronger than just sensitivity. Semblances of the Middle Passage figures show up again and again in variously constructed and titled works: not only in the bowels of a ship, but on a bridge, on grey heights, in rich red waves, and in other interestingly titled paintings. In her quest to know more about this aspect of African-American history, the artist bought and studied books on the slave ships, as well as publications like Callaloo, A Journal of African Diaspora Arts & Letters, which reproduced a painting of hers for one of its covers. 2000 Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center Exhibitions: Mercer County Artists Annual.  TheEllarslie Open. A solo exhibition at the Johnson & Johnson Corporate Gallery in New Brunswick, NJ in 1991.A 20-year retrospective at Mercer CountyCollege, NJ in 1997. UFA Gallery, NYC, 2003.  Virginia Lynch Gallery, Rhode Island,  c. 1996-2016 "I was never encouraged to seek art as a profession, but I was never discouraged either," 

Artist: Eleanor Burnette (1944–2020)

Date of Creation: 1992

Medium: Mixed Media

Subject: Figurative/Portrait

Dimensions: 18.75 x 14.75 x 1"

Framed: Yes

Signed: Yes

Signature Details: Initialed and dated center right