Oscar Tuazon Resurrects A Lost Scott Burton Work For New York's AIDS Memorial

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Oscar Tuazon Reworks Scott Burton's Salvaged Public Art for New York's AIDS Memorial

A piece of New York's public-art history is returning in altered form. On June 20, Oscar Tuazon's Eternal Flame for Scott Burton will be unveiled at the New York City AIDS Memorial in St. Vincent's Triangle, where it anchors programming for the memorial's 10th anniversary in the West Village.

The installation draws on salvaged elements from Scott Burton's 1987 Sheepshead Bay commission, a functional sculpture completed in 1994, five years after Burton died of AIDS-related illness at 50. The original work, made of perforated steel benches, wooden ottomans, lamps, and weathervanes, deteriorated over time and was badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. It was decommissioned a decade later.

New York City's Parks Department worked with Nicholas Olney and Eric Gleason, formerly of Kasmin Gallery and now of Olney Gleason, to remove and store the surviving components. Those materials now form the basis of Tuazon's new work, which pairs a circular metal bench with an elongated pole that emits a beam of light. Tuazon, known for large-scale sculptures built from found industrial materials such as concrete, timber, and steel, has here turned to Burton's own material legacy.

The original Sheepshead Bay project was commissioned through the Percent for Art Program, which has long required that one percent of New York City construction budgets support public art. The new installation was supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and several art foundations.

In a statement, Dave Harper, executive director of the New York City AIDS Memorial, said Tuazon's reinterpretation“honors a pioneering artist lost to AIDS” and“restores an essential chapter of New York's cultural legacy.” The memorial described the project as a bridge between generations, one that keeps Burton's functionalist ideas visible in a new civic context.

Burton, who trained as a painter before becoming a performance artist in the 1970s, later rejected the divide between high art and everyday use. He argued that the difference lay in consciousness, in the recognition that what appears to be a stain on the wall may in fact be a work of art. His public commissions in Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Midtown Manhattan extended that idea into the city itself.

Tuazon's installation suggests that Burton's questions remain unsettled: what public art can do, what it can remember, and how it can be made to speak again after loss.

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