Decades ago, Michael Burke and a companion were furnishing a Catskills house with “the country eclectic look … snooping around for small trinkets and gadgets and stuff for display purposes,” he said. “It would be some ‘tramp’ art, some popsicle-stick pieces, the safety pin baskets, the tin-can art.”
A 2016 exhibit at the New Orleans Museum of Art, “Unfiltered Visions: 20th Century Self-Taught American Art,” “triggered in my brain, like wow, these guys, these people, don’t have any monetary interest in this,” said Burke, by trade a lighting technician for film and television, including many seasons of the Law & Order suite of shows. “They just do this from compulsion or whatever the reason is, you don’t even know. They felt the urge to create out of simple materials with no education in the process. They just made things.”
The result, over many years, was a stellar personal collection of “self-taught” or “outsider” art. “‘Vernacular’ seems to be the educational term, but if I tell some friends of mine that I have some ‘vernacular’ art, they’re going to think it’s like something from the biology lab,” Burke said.
Many of those pieces are in a new exhibit at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, “Burke’s Delight: The Stacey and Michael Burke Collection,” on view through January 10, 2027. Concurrently, another Burke-enabled exhibit, “Herman Leonard: Images of Jazz,” on view through July 12, 2026, hangs nearby. Leonard, who called New Orleans home in the 1990s and early 2000s, captured smoky, heroic photographic portraits of jazz greats made primarily in the middle years of the last century.
Find print and podcast coverage of the exhibits here and here. Artwork photos below courtesy of the Ogden. Gallery photos above and below, including the photo of Michael and Stacey at the “Burke’s Delight” title wall at lower left, are by Ashley Lorraine on behalf of Ogden Museum of Southern Art.
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