Lowry Burgess
Lowry Burgess is an internationally renowned environmental artist. He created the first official art payload to be taken into outer space by NASA. His artworks are in museums in the US and in Europe.
He is Professor of Art and former Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University where he co-founded the Studio for Creative Inquiry which supports advanced research projects in the arts.
He has been a Fellow and Senior Consultant at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts for 25 years where he created and directed large collaborative projects in the US and Europe. He is on the International Advisory Committee on Art, Science and Technology at MIT.
He was the concept originator of the international new year's arts festival called "First Night". He originated the arts in the subways programs for the Department of Transportation. He has developed and advised in more than a dozen major city scale projects.
He has been honored with awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kellogg Foundation. His book, "Burgess, the Quiet Axis" received the prestigious Imperishable Gold Award from Le Devoir in Montreal.
He has been featured in numerous international television and radio broadcasts in the US, Europe and Japan including: NOVA, "Artists in the Lab"; Smithsonian World, "Elephant on a Hill", "Artists of Earthwatch": "Arts and New Technologies" (Tokyo 12); "Artransition" (German National Television); "The Quiet Axis" (Hungarian State Television), on MSNBC; and more than two hundred national and international radio broadcasts.
In 1974 Professor Burgess went to Bamiyan, Afghanistan on a Guggenheim Grant to do an artwork (a holographic lake of waterlilies and stars) in the dry valley opposite the Buddhas that have now been destroyed.