The Daily Bulletin Archive

Nancy Weekly, head of collections and Charles Cary Rumsey curator at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, presented "Charles E. Burchfield: Inventive Virtuoso" at the Detroit Institute of Arts in Detroit, Michigan, on Friday, April 11, as part of the Arts + Minds lecture series. Weekly was invited to speak about Burchfield, who was the primary artist featured in the exhibition Let Me Show You What I Saw: American Views on City and Country, 1912–1963, organized by Nancy Sojka, curator and department head of the Forum for Prints, Drawings & Photographs.

Weekly, who also serves as an instructor in the History and Social Studies Education Department's museum studies program, presented her research on Burchfield’s paintings in the DIA's collection, illustrating her presentation with these as well as works from the Burchfield Penney and prominent national collections. She argued that Burchfield has been identified as a naturalist, realist, modernist, romantic, synesthete, and transcendentalist—all with equal validity. He pioneered unique watercolor techniques and invented symbols to convey emotions and sensations. Burchfield’s range of interests, passionate devotion to nature, and cyclical interpretation of subjects keeps his work fascinating to audiences today.