Scott Burton (June 23, 1939-December 29, 1989) was an American sculptor and performance artist best known for his large-scale furniture sculptures in granite and bronze.
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Burton was born in Greensboro, Alabama to Walter Scott Burton, Jr. and Hortense Mobley Burton. While Burton was a child, his parents separated and Burton relocated to Washington, DC. with his mother.
Burton began his artistic career at the Washington Workshop of the Arts in the mid-1950s, before progressing to the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Between 1959 and 1962 Burton took classes at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, George Washington University in Washington, D.C., Harvard University, and Columbia University, where he finally received his Bachelor's Degree. In 1963 Burton was awarded a Master of Fine Arts degree from New York University in New York City[1].
While living in New York City, Burton worked at the membership desk of the Museum of Modern Art, which allowed him to befriend prominent artists and writers such as Edward Albee, Jerome Robbins, Lincoln Kirstein, and Alex Katz. With the help of these connections Burton began writing for Artnews in the mid-1960s, and by the end of the decade Burton had begun collaborating on conceptual art and performance pieces with artists such as Vito Acconci and Eduardo Costa.
In 1970, Burton began experimenting in furniture-based work while a guest lecturer at the University of Iowa. Burton participated in a two evening assembly of performances and installation art, Two Evenings. On the first evening he staged a performance, Ten Tableaux: Theater as Sculpture, and on the second evening exhibited the outdoor installation work, Furniture/Landscape. This was his first use of furniture[1].
Like many of the artists he befriended, one of Burton's primary artistic concerns was the dissolution of aesthetic boundaries, especially the traditional boundary between fine art and utilitarian design. The art historian Robert Rosenblum described Burton as "...singular and unique as a person as he was as an artist. His fiercely laconic work destroyed the boundaries between furniture and sculpture, between private delectation and public use and radically altered the way we see many 20th-century masters, including Gerrit Rietveld and Brancusi.[2]
Burton's sculptures frequently took the form of chairs and tables that, when not being exhibited, were used as functional furniture objects. Influenced by early 20th-century Modernist movements such as De Stijl and Bauhaus, Burton's furniture sculptures combined the geometric, abstract forms of Minimalism with "a sense of utility, history and wit"[2].
Burton died of complications due to AIDS on December 29, 1989, at Cabrini Medical Center in New York City. He was survived by no immediate family.[2]