Writings on Scott Burton’s Art and Performance

An early encounter with Scott Burton’s Bronze Chair at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College as an undergraduate student unfolded into a decades-long research project on the artist and his legacy.

On Scott Burton in the 1960s (introductions)

• “Introduction: Scott Burton’s Queer Postminimalism,” in Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), 1-41.

• "The Primacy of Sensibility: Scott Burton Writing on Art and Performance," in Scott Burton: Collected Writings on Art and Performance, 1965-1975, ed. David Getsy (Chicago: Soberscove Press, 2012), 1-32

On Scott Burton in the 1970s (books)

• Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art (University of Chicago Press, 2022).
  [Note: the chapters of this book have not been published elsewhere]

• Scott Burton: Collected Writings on Art and Performance, 1965–1975 (Soberscove Press, 2012)

• Magic Episodes and Other Synchronicities: The Transhemispheric Correspondence of Scott Burton and Eduardo Costa (forthcoming May 2026 from Ugly Duckling Presse)

On Scott Burton in the 1980s (essays)

• “Appearing Asymptomatic: Scott Burton’s Public Art and the Knowledge of AIDS,” American Art 39, no. 3 (Fall 2025): 54–83.

• “Public Affections: The Figurative Revelation of Scott Burton’s Late Work,” in Scott Burton: Shape Shift, exh. cat. (St. Louis: Pulitzer Arts Foundation, forthcoming September 2025), 27–37.

• “Illegitimate Heirs: Queer Artists’ Claims on the Modernist Canon,” forthcoming in 2026 from a peer-reviewed journal

• “Conclusion: Abstraction and the Unforeclosed,” in Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015).

• “Scott Burton’s Public Sculptures” [excerpt from conclusion to Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art], Burlington Contemporary (3 May 2023).

Selected lectures on Scott Burton’s work