Hannah Burr is a Detroit-based artist and author working across painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and art books. As a graduate of Brown University in Fine Art and Religious Studies, she has exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Currier Museum of Art; and The Drawing Center, New York, along many other exhibitions.
Burr creates abstract paintings, works on paper, artist books, sculpture, installations, and video that invite closer attention to everyday experience. Through color, found objects, and playful encounters, she explores how people perceive, connect, and find meaning. Her work makes questions about presence, ambiguity, and prayer approachable through direct experience.
Her paintings and works on paper emerge from a fascination with texture, color, shape, and form. She pours paint, builds surfaces, makes marks, and draws lines, allowing these actions to guide each work. Landscape remains a recurring source: a place remembered, a place imagined, or an expanse of light and color that opens into something less familiar.
In her conceptual projects, Burr brings everyday objects and materials found in museum basements into contact with the less tangible aspects of experience: sensations, fleeting interactions, and emotional tones. Play becomes a way to notice what is happening, who is participating, and how experiences differ even when people share a place and time. A simple action—stacking a wooden block instead of speaking a thought, or using blocks to send love to others—gives an elusive idea a physical form.
Her five artist books use visual abstraction and the structure of the book to invite intimate encounters with subjects including chemical elements, ambiguity, and prayer. Rather than requiring specialized knowledge or religious belief, they offer simple ways to explore questions that can otherwise feel distant or difficult to approach.
Inquiry initiates Burr’s projects, which may become collaborative encounters, site-specific works, invitations to interact, or practices people carry into their homes. Across these forms, she creates opportunities to pause, participate, and discover something within familiar experience. She returns continually to the immediate pleasures of paint, surface, mark, and line.
She will be featured in a duo exhibition, Forms in Motion, in December 2026 at PLAYGROUND DETROIT.
Her artwork is available on Artsy.
