Maureen Burdock, born in Germany in 1970, emigrated to the United States at age seven with her mother to escape domestic violence. She spent much of her childhood in the museums of Chicago, absorbing the work of artists who imbued their canvases with the intention and power to change minds: WWII era activist artists such as John Heartfield, Hannah Hoch, and Käthe Kollwitz; surrealist and magical realist artists like Leonora Carrington and Frida Kahlo; and contemporary feminist artists such as Judy Chicago and Barbara Kruger.

By age eight, Burdock’s own content-driven art emerged as a way to cope with immigration, incest, and the resulting sexual confusion. Later, her art teacher ordered her to keep a life-size nude self-portrait in a closet at her high school, which confirmed the young artist’s growing suspicion that she was going to be an outsider in the art world. In her late teens and early twenties, as a mom of a son and daughter, her art became a means for exploring childbirth and cultural perceptions of motherhood. Subsequently it became a vehicle for addressing questions about sexual orientation, religion, war, family origins, word origins, eugenics, and misogyny. In her mid-twenties, Burdock turned to installation arts, creating large-scale traveling exhibitions complete with sound, drawings, books, and paintings. In 2000, a trip to Poland and East Germany with her mother and grandmother brought her back to her origins, resulting in a two-month solo exhibition at the Anti-Kriegs (Anti-War) Museum in Berlin.

Burdock’s art education, too, was shaped by circumstance. She received a partial scholarship to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago while in her early twenties, but motherhood, finances, and a custody battle kept her from continuing past the first semester. Eventually graduating from Santa Fe Community College with an associate degree in media arts, she could finally support herself through commercial art. At this point she immersed herself In book design and production and proceeded to illustrate three books: Howling with Sakutarô: Cries of a Cosmic Waif, which won a 2005 Communication Arts award, A Woman Walking, and Jonathan’s Journey to Mount Miapu.

Her current fascination is with the graphic novella, a commercially viable medium that incorporates psychological depth, humor, and political savvy. In response to the femicides in Juárez, Mexico, which began in the early 1990s, Burdock embarked on a series of graphic novellas entitled the F Word Project: Five Feminist Fables for the 21st Century, for which she later received an award from Judy Chicago/Through the Flower for New Mexico Feminist Artists under 40. Her hope is that these novellas will help increase awareness of women’s struggles worldwide and eliminate injustices by providing archetypes of strong women with solutions.

Burdock herself, now living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, came to feminist consciousness as a direct result of her contact with generations of exceptionally independent women in her family. From them and from her life experience as a woman, immigrant, and artist, she found she could transmute bad situations with humor and grace. In homage to her own transmutation, she has adopted the surname Burdock, reminiscent of the hearty herb possessing a deep taproot that thrives globally, under almost any conditions. Her work is represented in the Brooklyn Museum Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art Base.