lloyd burlingame
Lloyd Burlingame (b. 1934) began his career in the theatre as a designer of sets, lighting, and costumes, working with such legends as Franco Zeffirelli, Peter Brook, and Joseph Papp. He was Chair of Design and Master Teacher at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts from 1971-1997. After a diagnosis of Stargardt disease — a genetic condition causing irreversible vision loss — Burlingame devoted his remaining years of eyesight to creating large-scale abstract paintings and multimedia fabric collages, many of which are in Summer Energy: Works 1962-1987, and were previously shown in venues including the Wadsworth Atheneum (Hartford, CT), Simon Gallery (Morristown, NJ), and Mill Gallery (Guilford, CT). This period of “making art while the sun shines” resulted in 72 major pieces and was documented by award-winning director George Stoney in the short film How One Painter Sees. At his retirement from NYU in 1997, Burlingame received the Distinguished Teaching Award. He had served as Chair of Design for twenty-six years — eighteen of them while legally blind.
Determined to live a full life in retirement, Burlingame partnered with Hickory, a yellow Lab guide dog from The Seeing Eye in Morristown, NJ — where he joyfully rediscovered the role of student after his decades as a teacher, and which became his beloved second home. He celebrated this partnership (and his work with Hickory’s successor, Kemp) in his first book, Two Seeing Eye Dogs Take Manhattan: A Love Story. With his third Seeing Eye dog, Al, he was featured in the 2017 bestseller The Dogist Puppies, by Elias Weiss Friedman (aka Instagram’s “The Dogist.”)
Burlingame published his second book, Sets, Lights, and Lunacy: A Stage Designer’s Adventures on Broadway and in Opera, after receiving the 2012 TDF/Theatre Development Fund’s Tobin Award for Sustained Excellence in Design for the Theatre. His most recent book is A Blessing Well Disguised: A Blinded Artist’s Inner Journey out of the Dark. His work is also included in the collections of the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center (Billy Rose Theatre Division) and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin (W.H. Crain Collection).
Lloyd Burlingame lives in Montclair, New Jersey.