Oscar Tuazon Resurrects a Lost Scott Burton Work for New York’s AIDS Memorial

Slowly but surely, Scott Burton, the late American sculptor whose work bridged high design and public utility, is receiving his due. In late 2024, the survey show “Scott Burton: Shape Shift” began touring the U.S. Now, a series of benches and lamps he designed for the piers of Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, New York, have been reimagined and will be installed in the city’s AIDS Memorial at St. Vincent’s Triangle.

, a functional sculpture designed by the Los Angeles-based artist Oscar Tuazon, will be unveiled on June 20. It’s the centerpiece of programming for the 10th anniversary of the AIDS Memorial in the West Village, the historic heart of New York’s AIDS epidemic.

The work offers a circular metal bench topped by an elongated pole that emits a beam of light. Tuazon is known for crafting large-scale sculptures using found industrial objects, such as concrete, timber, and steel. Here, his raw materials were Burton’s own. The Sheepshead Bay commission was Burton’s last public installation and was completed in 1994, five years after his death from AIDS-related illness at the age of 50. Consisting of perforated steel benches, wooden ottomans, lamps, and weathervanes, it decayed over time and was badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. A decade later, it was decommissioned.

Fortunately, New York City’s Parks Department connected with Nicholas Olney and Eric Gleason, formerly of Kasmin Gallery and now of Olney Gleason, who meticulously removed and stored the installation’s salvageable elements. Some of these materials now comprise , reworked for a new generation.

The 1987 Sheepshead Bay project was commissioned by the Percent for Art Program, which for more than four decades has ensured that one percent of New York City’s construction project budget is spent on public artworks. The new installation has been supported by funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs as well as a host of art-centric foundations.

“Oscar Tuazon’s reinterpretation of Burton’s final public installation honors a pioneering artist lost to AIDS,” Dave Harper, the executive director of the New York City AIDS Memorial, said in a statement. “[It] restores an essential chapter of New York’s cultural legacy, and bridges generations, affirming the memorial as a living site where art and remembrance converge.”

After training as a painter and spending the 1970s as a performance artist, Burton eventually turned his focus on sculpture. He dismissed the boundaries between high art and everyday life, writing in an essay that the only difference between the two was consciousness, “the awareness that what seemed to be a stain on the wall is in fact a work of art.”

He saw success in the 1980s through a series of public commissions, erecting granite chairs in downtown Pittsburg, a rock settee in St. Louis, and a since-removed semicircular marble bench in Midtown Manhattan. For Burton, there was a political dimension to his pragmatic structures: as a gay man of the Stonewall generation, he believed that if people could redefine what furniture was, perhaps they could do the same for what a person could be.

“Tuazon, whose practice likewise operates at the intersection of conceptual sculpture and public architecture, underscores the ongoing vitality of Burton’s practice,” New York City AIDS Memorial said in a statement. “By transforming the salvaged elements of the original work, Tuazon honors its materiality and functionalist roots while introducing new gestures in design, landscape, and civic engagement.”