NEW YORK TIMES: A Dying Artist Left His Legacy to MoMA. Today He’s Almost Forgotten

Scott Burton, one of America’s leading sculptors, entrusted his estate to the museum in 1989, when he was sick with AIDS, to ensure his place in art history. It turned out to be a bad idea.

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Burton’s work — its subtlety, its intimate relationship to the viewer, and its receptivity to the way we interact in public space — continues to inspire. Today, a contingent of historians, artists and curators is working to keep Burton’s legacy alive, even as his public art faces new threats.

In addition to the Pulitzer Arts Foundation show, Getsy, the author of “Queer Behavior” (2022), about Burton’s early performance art, is working with Patrick Greaney to compile Burton’s correspondence with the Argentine artist Eduardo Costa and publish it in 2025.

The Los Angeles-based artist Oscar Tuazon, together with the gallery Kasmin and the New York City AIDS Memorial, is breathing new life into one of Burton’s final public artworks: an array of lights, flag poles, weathervanes and ottomans on the fishing piers in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. Before New York City’s Parks Department took apart the installation in 2022 (it had decayed over time and had been ravaged by Hurricane Sandy), it connected with Kasmin, which staged a show of Burton’s work in 2015. (MoMA did not participate in the Kasmin exhibition, according to the gallery.)

“We made it our mission” to make sure the work “didn’t go into the dumpster,” said Eric Gleason, Kasmin’s head of sales. Over nearly two years, he said, Kasmin has paid around $100,000 to extricate and store the installation’s salvageable elements. Tuazon plans to transform them into a new work, “Eternal Flame for Scott Burton,” which is expected to be installed at the NYC AIDS Memorial in fall 2025.