14 Facts About Jack Burnham

Jack Burnham is one of the main forces behind the emergence of systems art in the 1960s.

Jack Burnham began his studies in 1953 at the Boston Museum School where he studied design, silversmithing, sculpture and painting.

Jack Burnham began a friendship with the Soviet sculptor Naum Gabo who was teaching at Harvard University at the time; he considered Gabo to be his mentor.

Jack Burnham took two years off between 1954 and 1956 to study engineering at the Wentworth Institute of Technology, and received an associates degree in engineering.

Jack Burnham received a BFA from the Yale School of Art in 1959 and a MFA in 1961.

Jack Burnham was the Inaugural Fellow at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies from 1968 to 1969.

Jack Burnham worked as a writer, and in the 1960s and 1970s made important contributions as an art theorist, critic and curator in the field of systems art.

Jack Burnham named Systems art in the 1968 Artforum article "System Esthetics": "He had investigated the effects of science and technology on the sculpture of this century, and saw a dramatic contrast between the handling of the place-oriented object sculpture and the extreme mobility of Systems sculpture".

Jack Burnham was the Associate editor of Arts Magazine between the years 1968 and 1970; he published many articles in the magazine.

In 1973, Jack Burnham was awarded a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to study the alchemical symbolism used in Marcel Duchamp's art.

Jack Burnham suggested that art and aesthetics were relavatory, and that art could operate as an "information-processing device", similar to machines or ritual, and that artworks could function as an apparatus between natural phenomena and cultural phenomena.

Jack Burnham was referenced in American artist Mike Kelley catalogue for his exhibition, "Mike Kelley: The Uncanny" at Tate Liverpool.

Jack Burnham speaks about the manner in which anthropomorphic figures became equivalent to traditional sculpture.

Jack Burnham wrote several books and dozens of articles in magazines like: Art and Artists magazine, Arts and Society, Artforum magazine, Arts magazine.