With a Beam of Light, the New York City AIDS Memorial Honors the Nearly Forgotten Legacy of This Great American Sculptor
A new sculpture draws on materials and ideas from Scott Burton’s artwork, which offered comfort in urban spaces. His final public series was a set of benches and lights on piers in Brooklyn
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A new sculpture honoring the life and work of Scott Burton—one of America’s most influential 20th-century sculptors, whose art offered both beauty and utility—is set to open to the public this week at the New York City AIDS Memorial in Manhattan.
The sculpture, Eternal Flame for Scott Burton, designed by contemporary artist Oscar Tuazon, is a reimagination of Burton’s final commissioned series: a set of benches, lights, weathervanes and ottomans designed for the Sheepshead Bay Piers in Brooklyn. The pieces, made from steel and wood beginning in the 1980s, were configured in thick shapes convenient for sitting and public engagement, two signature elements of Burton’s artworks.
Álvaro Urbano, a contemporary artist based in Berlin, described Burton as a “lunch artist” to the New York Times’ Julia Halperin in 2024, meaning that Burton’s creations functioned during midday breaks or post-work gatherings as places of respite for New York City workers and residents who sometimes were oblivious to the fact that they were artworks at all.
“My greatest challenge with [the project] was to discover how my contribution as an artist would fit into this very practical and down-to-earth setting,” Burton said of the Sheepshead Bay installations, which were completed after he died at age 50 in 1989 from AIDS-related causes.
Tuazon’s sculpture not only embodies the spirit of Burton’s larger collection of artwork, but it takes the form of—and some materials from—the Sheepshead Bay installations directly.
Decades of weathering and erosion, compounded by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, led to their decommissioning from the Brooklyn shoreline in 2022. A few pieces of the original were preserved from the site and harnessed by Tuazon for the memorial. When Eternal Flame debuts, it will bear likeness to Burton’s vision: a long pole will rise up from a circular bench, emitting from its top a beam of light.
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“Burton’s work undermines notions of artistic authorship and originality. The work isn’t about Burton, it’s about you and I find this so generous,” Tuazon tells Artnet’s Richard Whiddington. “It makes room for this kind of multi-generational collaboration. I feel I was able to inhabit Burton’s forms, his materials, and really try to make a work he could have made.”
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The flame will stand for one year and help mark the public park’s 10th anniversary of honoring the more than 100,000 New Yorkers who died due to AIDS-related illnesses and the countless caregivers and activists “who mobilized to provide care for the ill, fight discrimination, lobby for medical research and alter the drug approval process,” the park’s website reads.
Art historian David Getsy observed that Burton’s public works offered “‘a quiet, enduring model of resilience, intimacy and contact’ at a moment when physical presence itself carried risk,” reads a statement from the park announcing the memorial. “His furniture-like sculptures, including benches, chairs, and tables, blurred the boundaries between art, architecture and everyday life, embedding subtle queer experience and social connection within ordinary urban space.”
Did you know? Responding to tragedy
One artistic response to the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. was the AIDS Memorial Quilt, which was displayed on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. for the first time in 1987. Covering a space larger than a football field, it included more than 1,900 panels bearing names of people who had died.
For fans and friends of Scott Burton, Eternal Flame is also a long-overdue public recognition of the sculptor. In Burton’s final years, his art was selling for more than $100,000 and being showcased in public spaces and museums across the country. While on his deathbed, Burton chose to leave his estate to the Museum of Modern Art, a decision he felt would continue this momentum and inspire other queer artists. But it was decades, the Times reports, before any holistic showcase of his art was held.
“Eternal Flame for Scott Burton isn’t just a backward-looking monument,” Dave Harper, the executive director of the AIDS Memorial, tells the Art Newspaper’s Annabel Keenan. “It is an act of direct preservation and sensitive reimagining that suggests a perpetual renewal of Burton’s work and the generation he represents. Ultimately, I want visitors to see that history is not fixed and must not be forgotten.”
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