Image: Amanda Burnham (American, born 1979), Neighborhood Watch (installation detail), 2016, acrylic, flashe, paper, cardboard and LEDs, 5 vignettes, each approx. 10 x 10 x 5 feet. Site-specific installation for Fall Solos, Arlington Art Center, Arlington, VA. © Amanda Burnham
The Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa, is presenting "Amanda Burnham: Everything to Everyone", a site-specific installation in its Gildehaus Gallery, on view from 10 October 2026 to 14 February 2027. Burnham created the work in the museum this autumn, and she spoke about it at an artist talk at the Figge on Thursday, 8 October.
Burnham, a Baltimore-based artist born in 1979, is a draughtsman who uses drawing as the foundation for site-specific installations that turn her observations into immersive environments. According to the museum, her work often starts as quick sketches prompted by chance moments as she moves through the city. Reworked again and again, these drawings develop into a highly personal iconography and a distinctive visual language.
Her installations are built from hundreds of rapid, gestural drawings made with acrylic paint. They are collaged onto armatures and directly onto the gallery walls, where they build up into dense, layered environments that surround the viewer. The museum describes the result as combining elements of dreamscapes, comic books and theatrical stage sets.
For the Figge, Burnham sets the female figure within this urban landscape, using the installation to examine the forces that shape women's lives today.
An earlier example of her approach, shown on the museum's exhibition page, is "Neighborhood Watch" (2016), made for the Fall Solos programme at the Arlington Art Center in Arlington, Virginia. That installation used acrylic, flashe, paper, cardboard and LEDs across five vignettes, each roughly ten feet high and wide.
