The Brooklyn Rail

As yardmaster of Conrail’s railyard in Ashtabula Harbor, Ohio in the 1970s, my grandfather managed the traffic of hundreds of freight trains and rail workers daily, ensuring that each car bound for the Northeastern steel mills conveyed the correct tonnage of iron ore. If he broke concentration, workers could be maimed or killed. I remembered my grandfather’s incredibly dangerous work upon encountering the sculpture Sleeper Stack 2 (2018), installed at Broadway and 72nd Street in Manhattan as part of the outdoor public art exhibition Sean Scully: Broadway Shuffle. Sleepers (wooden railroad ties), once lay between a railroad’s tracks, maintaining proper distance between them. Today, they are mostly relics, replaced by concrete or steel that can withstand the weight of contemporary loads. Sean Scully’s sculpture is repurposed from these beams, each bearing the scars and patinas of past lives. He recut the worn planks, joined them at half laps, and arranged them in layers that reverberate in deep time, above the Manhattan schist. Sleeper Stack 2 stands beside the Control House, designed for New York City’s original subway system by the architects Heins & LaFarge, in 1904.

Sean Scully: Broadway Shuffle, organized by the Broadway Mall Association, in partnership with NYC Parks’ Art in the Parks program and Lisson Gallery, comprises seven unique, vertically stacked sculptures made of wood, metal and stone, sited along the verdant medians of Broadway, from Lincoln Square to Washington Heights. The project’s lead curator is Anne Strauss, an independent curator and member of the Broadway Mall Association’s Public Art Committee. Though Scully (b. 1945) has been engaged in a sculpture practice for more than two decades, this is his first exhibition in the United States to exclusively focus on this body of work. Any object situated within the relentless drama of a New York City street will compete for attention, but to unearth memory buried in time is the reward.

The herculean task of conveying the sculptures to their sites required precision labor. The ten-ton Shot Through (2019) could not be sited above subway tracks for instance, but instead in Ilka Tanya Payán Park at 157th Street, on ground that could bear its load. Made of naturally rusted Cor-Ten steel, it is a fierce and sobering work, tempered only by the fluttering honey locust trees encircling it. The massive, burnt orange form with a large hole drilled through its upper half conjures the searing image of the Twin Towers on 9/11. The tallest sculpture, 48 (2024), was transported in manageable mini-stacks, on flatbed trucks from the Philadelphia fabricator. Operatically arriving on the Upper West Side, the components were ushered into place—amid traffic flaggers who oversaw safe passage of commuters across lane closures and around the installation site—by a team of fabricators, installers, riggers and crane operators, orchestrating the assembly of the monumental work.

Scholarly friendship and the iconography of medieval color come together at 117th Street, the gateway to Columbia University. Stack Blues (In Honor of Arthur Danto) (2018), incorporating at least five variations on that pigment, assembles itself into a syncopated cascade of cooling shadows and light. Scully’s profound respect for art critic, philosopher, and Columbia University professor Arthur Danto is measured in gradations of azurites and ultramarines interleaved between enervating manganese blues and quieting greys. Scully crushes the distance between thirteenth-century Siena and our city, using blue tones like those blended by Sienese masters Duccio and Cimabue to represent firmaments and the Virgin’s robes.

The polychromatic symphony that is 48 rises twenty feet above Dante Park at Lincoln Center, the fulcrum of New York’s performing arts universe. Its painted aluminum staves, in kaleidoscopic hues of high-gloss automotive paint, has the sparkle of a beloved toy emporium. It is the most unusual, and ornamental work within the installation—propulsive rather than contemplative, and reminiscent of a stack of cardboard boxes flattened by a baling machine, which Scully first noticed the sculptural potential for while working at a Woolworth’s store in southeast London as a teenager.

Silver Brown Tower (2019), installed on 79th Street, is a pillar of restraint poised above metal subway grating. Echoing the crosswalk lines, it reflects light from its contrasting stripes, the steel treatments of smoldering Cor-Ten and chilly stainless that goes white in sunlight. The work speaks to the ornate edifice of the Italian Romanesque Revival First Baptist Church (1894) on the northwest side of Broadway. We’re embarking on a mental journey from the striped marble pilasters of the Baptistery of Saint John in Florence, to the dual-metal floor grids of Carl Andre (himself a former freight brakeman for the Pennsylvania Railroad)—precedents for a personal version of sacred geometries in Scully’s oeuvre. Through December 21, 2024, one could take the train downtown to see Scully’s darkly luminous painting, Adoration (1982) in the Lisson Gallery exhibition Sean Scully: Duane Street, 1981–1983 for a corresponding experience of awe before stripes.

As a World War II refugee exiled in New York, Piet Mondrian once painted the energies of his sanctuary city, in Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942). Forty years later, Michael Jackson threw down his electrifying version of James Brown’s shuffle at Broadway’s Beacon Theatre. Sean Scully reignites these histories, then takes us to the dance, where we become players on the stage of his own Broadway Shuffle.