Predominately capturing her neighborhoods and their environs, M. Burgess evokes a feel of shaky permanence that can be wiped clean in one cool sweep by developers, or by rot. She has put into play her father's architectural background as well as her grandfather's documentarian style of maritime preservation photography, albeit unconsciously at first.

M. Burgess marks her oil painting beginnings in 1985, when a painter friend handed her a Mason jar of turpentine, old brushes and tubes of used paint. She threw herself at the fortune bestowed upon her. Living in the skeleton of an ancient building where loose doors were propped against window holes to slow the elements, collecting wood scraps in the alleys to stoke the wall of coal burning fireplaces, she sat aside flat pieces to paint on. Whether they be door panels or squares of tin. Figurative work was the prominence. The buttery feel of oil was the captivator.

M. Burgess moved to Boston in 1990. Fueled by a different view, she began her cityscapes. She painted the neighborhoods that surrounded her, those occupied by Hispanic, Haitian, Irish and Asian. A new jive, a new wholeness of community. After befriending Allan Rohan Crite, the Southern landscape began to infiltrate her mind and canvas. She felt a tug to turn back South, knowing things would be changing soon and that they had to be captured.

In 1997, even before unpacking, she was painting from the window of a place that she knew she would one day live. Soon after, she and thirty five of her neighbors were suddenly evicted. M. Burgess organized the three blocks of poor, who fought the ruling. They eventually had to go, but not as empty-handed as promised. Holding that history in her hand, it became fodder, substantiating the power of Place and People.