Fall24_Scott Burton_Exhibition Guide

Scott Burton: Shape Shift For nearly three decades, American artist Scott Burton shape-shifted between the roles of conceptual artist, performance artist, public sculptor, critic, and curator. Working both inside and outside of the major arts institutions of his day, he created a unique body of work that considered the social nature of spatial relationships among people and objects. This career-spanning exhibition sheds light on Burton’s major contributions to new developments in twentieth-century art. His life was cut short at the height of his career when he died of AIDS-related complications in 1989. Scott Burton: Shape Shift seeks to uphold his legacy as a committed advocate of accessible, conceptual, and functional art forms that serve people of all types. Burton was born in 1939 in Greensboro, Alabama, and moved to Washington, DC, as a child. He studied painting as a teenager but earned degrees in literature and focused on writing early in his career. By the mid-1960s, he was a regular contributor to ARTnews, and between 1974 and 1976 he was on the editorial board of Art in America. In the late 1960s, Burton began making art professionally. He is best known for the works he described as “sculpture in love with furniture”—tables and chairs that subtly vary from the norm, changing how we perceive or interact with them. By taking these common objects as his subject matter, he sought to make work that everyone could approach and relate to.