Sigrid Burton

Sigrid Burton is an American visual artist, known for semi-abstract paintings that combine atmospheric color fields and allusions to nature and culture. Her work bears a wide range of influences, including Buddhist cave and Indian miniature paintings, Jain cosmological diagrams, and artists from the Renaissance to modernists such as Kandinsky, Klee and the Color field painters to the California Light and Space movement. Her work belongs to the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rockefeller Foundation and Palm Springs Desert Museum, among others.

Life and career Burton was born in Pasadena, California to Gene and Betye (Monell) Burton, who were both art patrons. She attended Westridge School for Girls (1963–9), where she participated in Allan Kaprow's Fluids (1967) and studied with performance artist Barbara T. Smith, assisting on her well-known performance, Ritual Meal (1969). After enrolling at University of California, Berkeley, Burton completed a BA degree (1973) at Bennington College in Vermont, studying with Pat Adams, Carol Haerer and Sidney Tillim. In 1994, she was awarded an Indo-American Senior Research Fellowship from the Fulbright Program to study the meaning and use of color in traditional Indian art and ritual forms.

In addition to her art career, Burton has taught for and served on the board of directors of LEAP (Learning through an Expanded Arts Program) in the New York City school system, volunteered and wrote a manual for AIDS service organizations, and served on the Manhattan Community Board 2 and board of trustees for the Westridge School.

Work While largely abstract, Burton's work has consistently referenced natural phenomena such as light and landscape, while drawing upon influences from Western painting and Indian art, as well as travel. She draws literally and figuratively from the natural world of botanical, biological and weather phenomena, the structures of macro and micro cosmologies, and systems such as writing.

After an art residency at the Bellagio Study Center in Italy in 1985, Burton began experimenting with painted borders and frames within the picture plane, as well as with abstracted biomorphic elements, color, and light derived from observed nature and landscape studies. These paintings were more abstract than previous work, with greater depth of field and dense layering; reviews noted an acrobatic visual play between mysterious color fields and loose, unfettered marks, which suggested responses to natural phenomena and personal experience rather than representations (e.g., Asterisms and Storm Heart, both 2019). In her later works on paper, such as Maroc (2013–6), she repurposed old drawings and accumulated ephemera from travels and the scrapbooks of her grandparents, collaging intentionally but cryptically biographical or autobiographical material. These later drawings explored a deeper sense of space and figure-ground ambiguity that crossed over to her paintings. Palm Springs Desert Museum, Mullin Automotive Museum, Bucknell University, and Lewis and Clark College, among others. Her work has also been used for covers for the poetry books, Sex Education (by Janice Moore Fuller) and The Poetry Project, Architectural Digest, Interior Design and House Beautiful.

Burton has been recognized with a Fulbright Indo-American Senior Research Fellowship (1994-1995), a Rockefeller Foundation Arts Residency at the Bellagio Study Center in Italy (1985), and a Rosenthal Family Foundation Award through the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1977). She has been a visiting artist at Delhi College of Art, the Chautauqua Institution, and Virginia Tech. In 2019, Westridge School recognized her with its Mary Lowther Ranney Distinguished Alumna Award.