Ruth Burke is an interdisciplinary artist, from and of the Midwest, who collaborates with animals in her creative practice. She is a teamster, farm laborer, professor, equestrian, and cultural worker. Straddling the practice of contemporary art and the fields of human-animal studies, and agriculture, Burke has exclusively focused on human-animal relationships in her practice since 2015. In addition to exhibition, her current focus is a series of large-scale native plant earthworks powered by animal traction.
Ruth Burke recently received the 2022 ISU University-level Creative Arts Initiative Award, which recognizes scholars with exceptional promise early in their careers, and is a 2024 Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education (SARE) Partnership Award Grantee. Burke has been a resident artist at ACRE, Detroit Community School, and was a fellow in the 2017 inaugural cohort at the Animals & Society Institute. She has co-authored articles in the peer reviewed journals Society & Animals, and Zoophilogia. Burke has presented her work at venues and institutions nationally and internationally, created earthworks in three US states, and received numerous grants from various entities.
Ruth Burke holds a BFA from the Ohio State University, an MFA from the University of Michigan, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Video Art in the Wonsook Kim College of Fine Arts, School of Art at Illinois State University.
DAP STUDIOS LLC is Ruth's art-and-agriculture business through which her and/or her animals are available for hire on public artworks, small scale agricultural and garden cultivation, compost production, garden consultations, and presence at events.
Ruth Burke recently received the 2022 ISU University-level Creative Arts Initiative Award, which recognizes scholars with exceptional promise early in their careers, and is a 2024 Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education (SARE) Partnership Award Grantee. Burke has been a resident artist at ACRE, Detroit Community School, and was a fellow in the 2017 inaugural cohort at the Animals & Society Institute. She has co-authored articles in the peer reviewed journals Society & Animals, and Zoophilogia. Burke has presented her work at venues and institutions nationally and internationally, created earthworks in three US states, and received numerous grants from various entities.
Ruth Burke holds a BFA from the Ohio State University, an MFA from the University of Michigan, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Video Art in the Wonsook Kim College of Fine Arts, School of Art at Illinois State University.
DAP STUDIOS LLC is Ruth's art-and-agriculture business through which her and/or her animals are available for hire on public artworks, small scale agricultural and garden cultivation, compost production, garden consultations, and presence at events.
Photo by Jesse Meria.
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some interests, in no particular order:
interspecies relationships and performance / Interspecies labor / pragmatic ecofeminism / multi-sensory thinking / human-animal studies / human-animal bond / land art / earthworks / performance / video art / animal cognition / phenomenology and technology (sound, moving image, responsive environments) / chosen family: queer and animal kin / mediating interspecies relationship / multispecies ethnography / small-scale agriculture & livestock farming / animal powered agriculture / site-specific art making / colonial/indigenous relationships to animals & agriculture / social practice - socially engaged art / community building through a multispecies art practice / animal creativity / interspecies collaboration |