ARTIST BIO

Mira Burack is an artist living in the mountains of New Mexico on the unceded land of Pueblo people. She received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and BA in Studio Art and Psychology from Pepperdine University. Burack was born in Boston, Massachusetts and grew up on the coast of Maine.

Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at CUE Art Foundation in New York City, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 516 ARTS in Albuquerque, New Mexico Museum of Art, Cranbrook Art Museum, Media Knox Gallery in Slovenia, Art Gallery of Windsor in Canada, Kunstverin Wolfsburg in Germany, among others. She received a Community + Public Arts Detroit grant for the Edible Hut, a community space with a living edible roof. In 2020, she was selected for the Women to Watch exhibition at the National Museum for Women in the Arts and nominated for a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors grant.

Burack spends her time learning from the high desert landscape, making, and enjoying her family. 

ARTIST STATEMENT

Plants, textiles, animals, family. The bed, the landscape, the table, the home.



I explore relationships that exist between humans, their possessions, and their environments. I am engaged by the materials and living beings in my daily life, and the interior and exterior spaces around me where meaningful experiences take place. How do the elements of daily life teach intimacy, engage the senses, provide comfort, heal, invite rest, and elicit pleasure?

Many of my projects explore the site of the bed and the legacy of sleep. The liminal resting body acts as a portal into an intermediary, horizontal state; this is a fluid place, characterized by the innate sensual movement of cloth. The bed is a rich, contemplative site to consider materials, relationships, and the experience of rest in a swiftly-paced 21st-century. 

Through installation, collage, sculpture, and communal experiences, I share the physical, psychological, and poetic qualities of matter and space. Projects often incorporate soft and found objects, botanicals, hundreds of layered photographs and painted surfaces, and community gatherings that conjure a felt, lived experience. My work straddles 2D and 3D, a space between woven textiles, the illusionary qualities of painting, a soft sculptural sensibility, and the values of land art.

SUMMARY PROPOSAL

SPREAD funding would allow me to research and plan for the early stages of Sleeping Huts – a new large-scale, land-based project in the foothills of the Ortiz mountains where I live that fuses my work from the past 20 years into my domestic and natural landscape. This site-specific project consists of three permanent, artistic, cabin-like spaces designed around an immersive, contemplative, and sensorial sleep experience that will connect guests to their bodies, the elements, and high desert materiality in resonant and memorable ways.

Learn more about Mira Burack here.