Jack Burnham, Fingerprinting, from Screen Prints 1970

Jack Burnham (b.Nov 13, 1931 - d.Feb 25, 2019) received a BFA from the Yale School of Art in 1959 and a MFA in 1961. From 1955 until 1965 he worked as a sculptor, often created sculptures that included light. In the 1960s he started teaching art history at Northwestern University, and became chairman of their art department. He was a Fellow at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies from 1968 to 1969. In the 1980s he moved to the University of Maryland and again chaired the art and art history departments.

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. His first book, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of Our Time, 1968, established him as the pre-eminent champion of art and technology of his generation. Building on this foundation, his second book, The Structure of Art, 1971, developed one of the first systematic methods for applying structural analysis to the interpretation of individual artworks as well as to the canon of western art history itself.

(http://dada.compart-bremen.de/item/agent/227, 2020)