This gallery of images features work from my portion of the 2025 Sondheim Finalists' Exhibition at the Walters Art Museum. I was the winner of the 2025 Sondheim Art Prize.

The news of my selection as a Sondheim finalist (including the attendant major museum show that came with it) coincided with an especially turbulent national moment, a week after the presidential inauguration. Feeling intense emotion, overwhelm, and the desire to act effectually (along with millions of others) in this moment, I embraced the news as an opportunity to respond directly to current events in real time on a uniquely public platform. Thus, I created all of the work that was ultimately shown at the Walters in the two and a half months leading up to exhibition, and designed my part of it as a cohesive statement. 

In three oversized, site specific, dimensional collage installations, and six large, framed dimensional collage drawings, I told stories of resistance and survival: women struggling against enormously difficult circumstances, and rising to meet and surmount them with strength and resourcefulness. Drawing on my past work, but significantly expanding its thematic reach and formal ambition, I made a metaphor of the figure/ground relationship: larger than life bodies posited in direct conflict with baroque, aggressively dynamic grounds, to suggest the daily struggles of people in contention with the mounting challenges of an increasingly complex, confounding, and oppressive world.

The resulting works drew from my past practice, formally innovative in its own right, but broke considerable new ground. Like the ideas animating them, the process of construction was new. Rather than working entirely on site as I have in the past, I allowed the imagery in them to build over time on large panels that then became the basis for my extemporaneous collaging in the space. In the framed works, I was able to translate my installation practice in a totally different scale for the first time – again, allowing the imagery to germinate and develop over time. 

I was thrilled that the works on view were the most rich, complex, and nuanced I have yet achieved. Cara Ober of Bmore Art agreed: “In the bold, dimensional works on paper by
Amanda Leigh Burnham, I am seeing the connections between comic books, Japanese woodblock prints, Expressionists like Edvard Munch, and Baltimore street writing, where lines contain multitudes of meaning...As you lean in close, currents of intense, warm and cool colored tendrils vine around recognizable fragments of body parts, rocky outcroppings, architecture, and nets...Burnham’s section of this exhibit offers a delirious, improvisational chaos that references Baltimore’s decay and energetic rebirth, coupled with the crisp linear brush strokes of a graphic novel, like feral cartoons.”

I was commissioned by curator Brian Young to create a solo exhibition to open a new gallery at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock in the Fall of 2024. This exhibition turned out to be pivotal in my evolution towards figure forward, narrative vignettes using the extemporaneous collage process I had been developing over the past decade. The vast dimensions of the gallery and unusual, compartmentalized architecture allowed me to realize a long fomenting vision.

The works in this exhibition, inspired by my adjacent comics practice, were more narratively driven than past works in their exploration of human relationships. Images of isolated people longingly seeking connection, avoidant people lost in their own worlds or escaping the curiosity and attention of others, or actively clashing, speak to concerns about the contemporary dysfunction of communities and deterioration of social networks. The title of the show, “Y tho?”, a fragment of online/meme sourced language, gives voice to these concerns and recurs through the vignettes on display: why is it so easy to lapse in our inherent human desire to be vital in eachother’s lives?

The works in this gallery picture site specific installation work from a variety of exhibitions between 2020 and 2023. Though my well established process of constructing extemporaneous dimensional collages on site within the exhibition space continues in these works, in this time their content was resolutely beginning to evolve in a more personal direction. Pivoting away from work that looked exclusively outward at the city, these works start to address domesticity and interiority, and exist in a realm of metaphor rather than pure observation.