Artist Sean Scully Celebrates the “Endless Rhythms of Broadway” with New Art Installation

Sean Scully pays homage to the cultural vibrancy of Broadway Avenue with a seven-piece project named Sean Scully: Broadway Shuffle. One of the sculptures, Stack Blues, resides between the Barnard and Earl Hall gates on 117th Street.

Stack Blues (In Honor of Arthur Danto) by Sean Scully at 117th St and Broadway. Photography by Haley Scull/The Barnard Bulletin

By Haley Scull

August 21, 2024

Vibrant blues and geometric precision define Stack Blues (In Honor of Arthur Danto), the latest art installation in Morningside Heights located just outside the Barnard gates in the center meridian of Broadway Avenue. This piece is just one of Sean Scully’s seven sculptures that span over a hundred blocks of Manhattan in his recent art installation in partnership with the Broadway Malls Association entitled Sean Scully: Broadway Shuffle. These sculptures, installed in mid-July, will remain through March 2025.

“Broadway is legendary, and it has been mythologized in art and song,” said Scully, discussing his inspiration behind the piece. “I called my project ‘Shuffle’ after a dance, in the same way that Mondrian, another geometric immigrant, called his painting ‘Boogie Woogie.’ I love the idea of my blocks and stacks punctuating the endless rhythm of Broadway.”

Though Scully is most often known for his stripe-based abstract paintings, his bold use of geometrics and color extends beyond the canvas with these Broadway sculptures. Each of the seven ‘stacks’—placed between Lincoln Square and Washington Heights—utilizes different materials, colors, and configurations, set to embody the atmospheres and energies of the various neighborhoods. The seven sculpture piece acts, as art critic Lilly Wei referred to it, as a “relay race up Broadway,” linking the neighborhoods through a “six-mile pilgrimage.”

Proposed specifically for the Morningside Heights location by Scully himself, Stack Blues (In Honor of Arthur Danto) honors the late Columbia philosophy professor and art critic, whom Scully refers to as “a great friend and bodyguard.”

Standing at nine feet tall and created out of aluminum coated in vivid blue automotive paint, the monochromatic blue tower originally debuted in 2017 for a separate project, Landline, as an exploration of the sea, the sky, and the horizon line between them. At over a thousand pounds, the sculpture is held together by the weight of its eighteen square parts, using only gravity to secure it to the ground.

Sean Scully: Broadway Shuffle is set to be the focal point of a new curriculum developed by Teacher’s College in conjunction with the Broadway Malls Association. The program, according to the exhibition’s press release, aims to encourage students to “consider life in a city that connects people, art, and nature.”