This fall the Pulitzer Arts Foundation presents In two, an installation of site-specific sculptures and a series of performances choreographed by the internationally recognized, Chicago-based artist Brendan Fernandes (b. 1979, Kenya). Organized in conjunction with the exhibition Scott Burton: Shape shift, on view from September 6, 2024 to February 2, 2025, the project highlights the legacy of Burton’s work on artists working today.

Fernandes, who identifies as multinational and queer, has written a set of four choreographic scores taking the furniture sculptures of the late Scott Burton (1939-1979) as an affective backdrop from which to explore the duality of display and concealment in gay cruising culture. Scott Burton had pursued these and related ideas in his own work. Fernandes integrates specific gestures—flip the wrist, clasp arm to the breast—from Burton’s choreographic notes for Individual behavior tableaux which are on display for the first time in history.

A set of soft sculptures designed by Fernandes compliment and contrast with the hard materials of the Burton works. Dancers engage with the curtains installed in the upper and lower levels of the main gallery, and a set of pillows are used as props during performances.

In two will be performed on three weekends at multiple times each day: September 7th, 2024; November 8th and 9th, 2024; and January 17th and 18th, 2025.

“We at the Pulitzer are proud to be presenting the work of these two artists in dialogue", says Cara Starke, Pulitzer’s Executive Director. “It is stunning to gaze across a divide of 40 years and see through the eyes of a vanguard artist and thinker like Brendan how revelatory Scott Burton’s work was and is”.

Jess Wilcox, independent curator and organizer of Shape Shift, notes that, “While the movement of Fernandes’ improvisational sensual choreography could not feel more distinct than Burton’s early controlled, slow, alienating proscenium tableaux performances, both directly engage with queer signaling. In Two has greater affinity with Burton’s more accessible later public furniture sculptures and environments that explored notions of invitation, touch, coupling, and coded meaning, while using sculptural means to shape human movements through space”.

“In two is like a duet between Scott Burton and me. I am choreographing a kind of call and response between the dancers in movement and the sculpture that leads me deeper into ideas I’m interested in: two becoming one, one becoming two, and the invisible and visible in queerness”, says Brendan Fernandes.

In two: the sculptures and performance

In two, duets choreographed for four dancers, has been conceived for a particular visual and spatial experience: the temporary exhibition of Scott Burton’s furniture sculptures inside the upper and lower levels of the Tadao Ando-designed museum.

Dancers will wear white t-shirts, jeans, and slightly elevated platform shoes, just as Burton dressed the dancers for his performance piece Pair behavior tableaux at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1976. Their movements—passing or confronting one another, entwining, looking directly at one another or looking away—draw on gay cruising codes and engage movement with sculpture.

Fernandes has designed two sets of large subtly translucent curtains to delineate a theatrical stage and suggest an unmarked site for gay cruising. The curtains are patterned with tan and blush-colored scattered marks, resembling a dance score, but inspired by the marks left on a phone screen from swiping on dating apps. Pillows covered in a faux rock pattern project a sly delight in doubleness akin to that of Burton’s, yet their soft tactility contrasts with Burton’s stone sculptures nearby. Dual impulses towards both transparency and obfuscation have long figured in Fernandes’s work, as for Burton’s before him.

The curtains and pillow sculptures in In two were made in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, where Burton produced Window Curtains in 1978. A companion set of curtains and pillows by Fernandes are on view at The Fabric Workshop as part of their exhibition Soft/cover, later this year through late 2025.

The project is organized by Kristin Fleischmann Brewer, Deputy Director, Public Engagement and independent curator Jess Wilcox for the Pulitzer.