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Scott Burton
(June 23, 1939 - December 29, 1989) USA

Scott Burton

Sculptor, performance artist

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Scott Burton was born in Greensboro, Alabama to Walter Scott Burton, Jr. and Hortense Mobley Burton. While Scott was a child, his parents separated and Burton relocated to Washington, DC. with his mother.

Scott 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 Scott 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 arts degree (magna cum laude ).

In 1963, he earned a master's degree in English literature from New York University, and for the next decade he devoted himself to theater. In the early 1970s, he turned to performance and conceptual art, whereupon he began building his reputation as a provocative artist.

He became known for his series of Behavior Tableaux (1972), in which silent actors on a stage eighty feet from the audience moved slowly around abandoned pieces of furniture. His chair sculptures, the first of which was Bronze Chair (1972), emerged from his performance art.

Inspired by Russian Constructivist principles and the works of the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncu?i, these pieces characterized his artistic practice for the rest of his career. Like his Behavior Tableaux , his furniture sculptures explored the relationships between people and objects and played with notions of performativity in public space.

Scott died of complications from AIDS, at the age of 50, at Cabrini Medical Center in New York City. He was survived by his partner, Jonathan Erlitz, who died in 1998.

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Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - https://arts.uchicago.edu/

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