Pat Burnett of Las Cruces, N.M., graduated from WSU with a bachelor's degree in fine arts in 1968. She later earned a master's degree in public administration.
"Incidentally," the artist recalls, "while I was in graduate school, I house sat for John and Debbie Bardo while they were on sabbatical in Australia and watched their crazy cairn terrier, Frosty."
Burnett has another connection to WSU President Bardo: She contributed a chapter, "The Chinese in American Cities," to his textbook Urban Sociology.
Among Burnett's recent artistic contributions has been the exhibition, Heart of the Home: The Art of Patricia Burnett, at the New Mexico Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum in Las Cruces.
Heart of the Home featured 26 pieces of art — mostly acrylic paintings, including "Sunflower" shown here, and also some mixed media — that are based on quilt patterns from her family. She says the show served as a "kind of social history of a pioneer family. Family histories are often relegated to the attic of our lives. They are abbreviated into family trees with only dates and places. There is no sense of who these people were and how they lived. It was my intent to offer a glimpse into my family. By sharing stories and photographs along with my paintings based on traditional quilt patterns, I stitched the tale of an American family into the fabric of American history."
