Oscar Tuazon Reimagines Scott Burton’s Final Public Work for the New York City Aids Memorial
A new sculpture in Manhattan’s West Village is turning preservation into a public gesture. On June 20, the New York City Aids Memorial will unveil Eternal Flame for Scott Burton (2026), a commission by American sculptor Oscar Tuazon that revisits the final public work of Scott Burton, the artist whose career bridged sculpture, design and civic space before his death from an Aids-related illness in 1989.
Installed at St Vincent’s Triangle, the work arrives as the memorial marks its tenth anniversary. Tuazon’s piece draws directly from Burton’s landmark installation for the Sheepshead Bay fishing piers in Brooklyn, a project commissioned in 1987 and completed posthumously in 1994. That earlier work became one of Burton’s clearest statements about public art: functional, socially engaged and quietly radical in the way it folded benches, lighting and other utilitarian forms into sculpture.
Time and weather took their toll. After years of exposure, and damage compounded by Superstorm Sandy, the Sheepshead Bay work was decommissioned in 2022. Some of its components were preserved by Nicholas Olney and Eric Gleason of Olney Gleason, and Tuazon incorporated salvaged elements into the new commission. He said he tried to follow Burton’s intentions as closely as possible, using red Atlantic granite, a material Burton often favored, and reworking damaged terrazzo into a new aggregate material.
Tuazon, whose practice moves between architecture, social engagement and conceptual sculpture, first encountered Burton’s work as an art student in New York in the 1990s. He has described Burton’s sculptures as having a “dual nature” — publicly visible yet deeply private — a tension that helped shape this new commission. The finished work takes the form of a circular bench with a pole that casts a beam of light, a structure meant to be used as much as viewed.
For Dave Harper, executive director of the New York City Aids Memorial, the project is less a retrospective gesture than an active one. He has described Eternal Flame for Scott Burton as an act of preservation and sensitive reimagining, one that keeps Burton’s work, and the generation it represents, present in civic life. Harper also said the memorial wants visitors to understand commemoration as “an active, living verb.”
The unveiling will include drag performances, live music and floral installations, underscoring the memorial’s broader aim: to hold grief, history and public life in the same frame. In Tuazon’s hands, Burton’s unfinished legacy becomes something tactile and communal — a reminder that memory in the city is not fixed, but continually remade.
