Student artist’s work embraces the era of peace and love

It’s easy to fetishize the ’60s. Many students have heard, “Aw man, if only the Beatles were around today,” or any statement of nostalgia for the ’68 riots and revolutionary fervor. While that decade might be over, Seattle native Madison Burgess, BC ’10, seeks to recreate it with her ’60s-inspired art.

Burgess’s activist aesthetic is illustrated literally and metaphorically. She has posted her own political posters all over campus, allowing her art to transcend the institutional and become interactive. The posters feature phrases like “Educate to Liberate” and “Make Love.” What better way to represent activism than to incite it?

She is currently most drawn to printmaking—although her favorite medium is normally pencil drawing—and her subject matter of choice for the moment is late ’60s political protest. She sees no value in still lifes and chooses instead to focus on good weather, engaging films, and exciting people as inspiration.

Burgess describes herself as “positive, spontaneous, attempt to be spontaneous, and colorful,” and it’s easy to believe her. She dresses in psychedelic garb, the bright colors and swirly patterns moving in stark contrast to the dreary, rainy backdrop of New York in April. Her nervous giggle and infectious, open personality are perhaps related to her upbringing with two artist parents. Her mom, a costume designer, taught her how to draw while her father, a comedic actor, introduced her to a different kind of art.

Burgess seemed self-conscious about delivering quirky responses to slightly invasive personal questions, saying, “It’s scary to paint yourself with these kind of facts. It’s like Inside the Actor’s Studio.” Still, she consistently offered unpredictable and interesting tidbits about herself. For example, her favorite space in the city to think is not even in the city. It’s the Metro-North line along the Hudson, an unconventional sanctuary she discovered once upon a time while visiting a friend at Vassar. She loves that train so much that she recently rode it to Marble Hill just to go to Target.

Burgess is so open-minded that it’s easy to feel conservative in her presence. She lives her life by the saying, “Success is having options,” which was imparted to her by her “quasi-adopted Chinese aunt, but also Harrison Ford.” She’s so open that she eats—or at least has eaten—pizza off Broadway. As in the street. As in off the sidewalk. She sees no problem in believing in good luck and has a go-to rabbit’s foot keychain. She also falls in love, over and over again. When asked if she’s ever been in love, she replied with a confident, “Yeah! All the time.” Her world is boundless.

In that way, Burgess’s art becomes self-reflexive. She’s as vibrant and reminiscent of the spirit of the ’60s (and not in a hokey way, either) as her pieces currently on display for her senior thesis on the fifth floor of the Diana Center. She’s a girl of constant change, ready to take on the world with a refreshing flexibility and hesitant to classify her work at all. Instead, she said, “Well it’s usually… No… Let’s just say that this year has been late ’60s political activism.” So what source of inspiration might next year bring? Even Burgess herself will just have to wait and see.

Elyssa Goldberg’s biweekly series In the Studio profiles some of Columbia’s student artists.