Janine Burke is an Australian author, art historian, biographer, novelist and photographer. She also curates exhibitions of historical and contemporary art. She is Honorary Senior Fellow, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne. She was born in Melbourne in 1952.
Education
Burke attended Catholic Ladies College, East Melbourne (1965-1967), then Malvern Girls High School (1967-1970). She won a Commonwealth Government Scholarship which enabled her to attend the University of Melbourne. She graduated in 1974 with a Bachelor of Arts (Hons), majoring in art history. In 1986 she was awarded a Master of Arts at La Trobe University, and a PhD from Deakin University in 2002.
Career
1970s-1980s
In 1973, Burke began to publish art reviews and essays. The following year, she co-curated A Room of One's Own: Three Women Artists, perhaps Australia's first feminist group exhibition with Lynne Cook and Kiffy Rubbo, director of the George Paton Gallery, University of Melbourne. The artists were Lesley Dumbrell, Julie Irving and Ann Newmarch. In 1975, Burke was a founding member of the Women's Art Movement in Melbourne. She was commissioned by Rubbo to curate Australian Women Artists: 1840-1940. A national touring exhibition, the research was published as a book in 1980.
In 1975, she was a founding member of the feminist arts journal Lip.
From 1977 to 1982, Burke was the inaugural art history lecturer at the Victorian College of the Arts where she designed and taught the art history course for undergraduate and postgraduate students. During that time she curated retrospectives of Joy Hester and Bea Maddock at the National Gallery of Victoria.
She resigned to become a novelist and independent scholar.
In 1983, after the publication of Joy Hester, Burke left Australia for Tuscany. She had a residency at Paretaio, the house belonging to Australian artist Arthur Boyd and his wife Yvonne situated halfway between Pisa and Florence. Judith Blackall had established the Boyd home as a studio and residency for artists, administered by the Australia Council for the Arts. Artists resident around the same time as Burke included Janet Laurence, Elizabeth Gower, John R. Neeson and Domenico de Clario. Burke moved to Florence where she studied Italian at the British Institute. In 1984, she sojourned in Paris, where she befriended artists Stephen Benwell, Anton Hart, Bronwyn Oliver and Don Walters (all resident at the Cite Internationale des Arts) and translator Julie Rose. She then returned to Australia for the publication of Speaking.
In 1986, Burke was appointed to the inaugural board of the Melbourne Writers Festival held at the Athenaeum Theatre in Melbourne's CBD. Her novel, Second Sight won the 1987 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for fiction. In 1986, she was writer-in-residence in Hobart and in 1989 at the University of New England, Armidale.
In the mid-80s, Burke settled in Robe Street, St Kilda, where Joy Hester and Albert Tucker had lived in the 1940s. She continued to write fiction, both novels and short stories, as well as contributing art reviews and essays to journals and newspapers. She was an advisory editor to art and literary journals including Art and Australia, Imprint, Island and Meanjin.
1990s
Burke has judged literary awards, including the Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship and The Age Book of the Year. Between 1994 and 1997, she was a member of the programming committee of the Melbourne Writers Festival.
In 1995, Burke published Dear Sun: The Letters of Joy Hester and Sunday Reed, the correspondence between Hester and arts patron Sunday Reed. Tucker made his photographs available for Burke to illustrate the book. Sunday, Hester's closest friend, had adopted Hester's son, Sweeney. In 1981, Sunday and John Reed's home and their art collection became the Heide Museum of Modern Art. When Burke was a lecturer at the Victorian College of the Arts, Sweeney, an artist and a former gallery director, was a mature age student in the printmaking department. Sweeney assisted Burke with her research on Hester. In 1979, Sweeney took his life.
2000s
From 1996 to 2004, Burke was a trustee of Heide MoMA. She was a member of the committee which oversaw the restoration of Heide I, the Reed's original home on the property, which opened to the public in 2001.