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Lecture: Public Affections—The Revelations of Scott Burton’s Last Works

Oct. 9, 6 pm

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In his last works, Scott Burton began to reveal many of the priorities that had driven his work in public art. His sculptures often hide in plain sight as functional objects ready to be used, and he aimed for his work to be of service—even if they were not seen as art at all. In the last years before his death of AIDS-related disease in 1989, Burton created sculptures that started to lay bare the bodily, sexual, and social underpinnings of his practice of semi-anonymous sculptures waiting for contact. In this lecture by the award-winning historian of Burton’s art, David Getsy will discuss how the human form came into focus in Burton’s final, lyric sculptures.

This lecture is presented at the Art Institute of Chicago in conjunction with the exhibition Scott Burton: Shape Shift at Wrightwood 659. The program continues on October 10 with a special tour of Shape Shift, featuring David Getsy and Jess Wilcox, the exhibition’s curator.

About the Speaker

David J. Getsy is the author of Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art (2022), which won the Robert Motherwell Book Award for outstanding publication in the history of modernism in the arts. His other books include Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (2015/2023), Scott Burton: Collected Writings on Art and Performance (2011), and the forthcoming co-edited volume Magic Episodes and Other Synchronicities: The Transhemispheric Correspondence of Scott Burton and Eduardo Costa. He is Professor Emeritus at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow. He currently teaches at the University of Virginia, where he is the Eleanor Shea Professor of Art History.

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