Artist & Curator Talk: Afterlives with Álvaro Urbano, Jess Wilcox, and Jeremy Johnston

Álvaro Urbano: TABLEAU VIVANT builds a speculative bridge in time and space between artists, sites, and choreographies of public and private life. For his exhibition at SculptureCenter, artist Álvaro Urbano focuses on a potential ruin, or a ruin in progress: Atrium Furnishment, a public artwork from 1984–85 by the American sculptor Scott Burton (1939–1989) that was rescued from destruction and now faces an uncertain future.

Join Urbano and independent curators Jess Wilcox and Jeremy Johnston for a three-part afternoon program on Urbano’s exhibition, its restaging of the marble material of Burton’s almost-lost artwork, and new perspectives on the life and work of Scott Burton by two curators whose efforts have deepened our understanding the many issues in contemporary art Burton’s legacy incites.

Álvaro Urbano Artist Talk

Álvaro Urbano introduces TABLEAU VIVANT (his current exhibition at SculptureCenter, on view Sep 19, 2024–Mar 24, 2025) and the ongoing artistic concerns that guide his work across media and through histories of art, architecture, and environment.

Álvaro Urbano is a Madrid-born and Berlin-based artist whose site-responsive practice involves an archeology of desires and past intentions. Formally trained as an architect, Urbano draws on affective responses to built environments, excavating narratives that are embedded in these built bodies. The exercise of recreating and reframing art, architecture, and literature becomes an intimate exploration of the subjectivity of other artists and the social contexts in which their spaces were considered functional, innovative, or condemned to oblivion.

Jess Wilcox on Scott Burton

Jess Wilcox is an independent curator based in New York City and the Hudson Valley. She is the curator of Scott Burton: Shape Shift, the most comprehensive exhibition of Scott Burton’s work ever mounted in the United States, on view at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis from Sep 6, 2024–Feb 2, 2025.

Jess Wilcox’s curatorial work has a focus on sculpture, ecocritical and public art. From 2016 to 2022, she was Curator and Director of Exhibitions at Socrates Sculpture Park. From 2011 to 2015, she worked at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Wilcox has held positions at MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Performa, Abrons Art Center, and SculptureCenter. She has a BA from Barnard College and an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. At SculptureCenter, Wilcox curated In Practice: Under Foundations as Curatorial Fellow in 2015.

Jeremy Johnston on Atrium Furnishment: removal, afterlife, future

Curator Jeremy Johnston saved Scott Burton’s Atrium Furnishment (1984–85) from near destruction during a renovation of Equitable Center in 2020. From within Álvaro Urbano’s restaging of elements of Burton’s work, Johnston reflects on Burton’s legacy and how to understand art objects after they have “ended” – whether through conservation, archival work, reprisals, reenactments, or other sustaining strategies.

Jeremy Johnston is a founding member of Darling Green, a collaborative curatorial practice, which has worked with the United Nations, Bard Graduate Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, MoMA PS1, Museum for African Art, Performa, and American Folk Art Museum. He is Curator of the Equitable Art Collection and a core faculty member of the The Interdisciplinary Art and Theory program. Darling Green’s work on Scott Burton’s Atrium Furnishment has been developed in collaboration with Soft Network.