For Immediate Release
June 12, 2024

Contact: Jessica Burlingame
jessica@agonadvisors.com
Phone (413) 228-3244

SUMMER ART EXHIBITION SHOWCASES THEATRICAL SETS AND COSTUMES, LARGE-SCALE ABSTRACT PAINTINGS, AND MULTIMEDIA/FABRIC COLLAGES

Stockbridge, MA – A new art exhibition, Summer Energy: Works 1962-1987, featuring the work of New York artist Lloyd Burlingame, will be presented at the former Schantz Gallery at 3 Elm Street, Stockbridge, MA, July 9 through August 26, 2024. The exhibition showcases Burlingame’s theatrical and costume designs, ‘dream paintings’ created during a Jungian analysis, and other watercolors from the 60s and 70s. It also features many of the 72 large-scale abstract works on canvas, paper, and fabric he crafted during 15 months in 1986-87 – the last art he was able to make before losing his eyesight due to a hereditary condition.

Measuring four feet square, Burlingame’s painting Summer Energy exemplifies his final creative surge as a visual artist and gives the exhibit its name. The exhibit takes visitors through a rich evolution of his work in three decades, from the intricately detailed stage and costume designs of his earlier career to the bold, experimental, joyous later works he made with inspiration and courage, knowing he would soon be blind.

Jessica Burlingame, the artist’s niece, is curating the exhibition. “Lloyd and I are honored that Stockbridge will be giving Lloyd’s work its first New England viewing in many years,” says Ms. Burlingame.  “We hope this exciting exhibition will contribute to the ‘summer energy’ in the Berkshires for 2024.”  

Summer Energy: Works 1962-1987

July 9 – August 26, 2024
Thursday-Monday, 12 pm – 5 pm, by appointment Tuesday and Wednesday
OPENING RECEPTION: JULY 9, 4 pm - 6 pm.
the former SCHANTZ GALLERY
3 Elm Street, Stockbridge, MA
For information: https://www.summerenergyart.com

Bio

ARTIST

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 progressively losing his eyesight.

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. www.lloydburlingame.com

Curator

Jessica Burlingame conceived and curated Summer Energy: Works 1962-1987. She is an executive and leadership coach and MBA admissions consultant who moved to the Berkshires in 2009 as a Kripalu volunteer. Jessica integrates somatic, contemplative, and theatre-based practices into her work with individuals, teams, and organizations, including the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (London, UK) and UKON (Copenhagen, Denmark). She has proudly appeared in numerous productions with Riggs Theatre 37 at The Lavender Door in Stockbridge, directed by Kevin G. Coleman. She holds an MBA from Columbia University. Summer Energy: Works 1962-1987 is her first exhibit as a curator. She is Lloyd Burlingame’s niece.

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