Sean Scully: Broadway Shuffle, presented by the Broadway Mall Association, is a public art project opening on 12 July. The exhibition will bring together a dazzling sequence of seven large-scale sculptures, each a unique vertical stack composed of metal, stone or wood, presented at seven locations along Broadway, Manhattan, from Lincoln Square to Washington Heights.

The Broadway Mall Association Board of Directors President, Nancy G. Chaffetz, stated: “This summer artist Sean Scully offers a most generous gift to the New York City public, ‘Sean Scully: Broadway Shuffle.’ On behalf of the Broadway Mall Association, many thanks to the artist, NYC Parks and Lisson Gallery for making the exhibition possible.”

The artist recently said: “Broadway is legendary, and it has been mythologized in art and song. 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.”

Presented by the Broadway Mall Association, the exhibition is organized in partnership with NYC Parks’ Art in the Parks program and Lisson Gallery, with assistance from the Lincoln Square Business Improvement District. On view for eight months, until March 2025, Scully’s “Broadway Shuffle” is the fourteenth exhibition to be presented by the Broadway Mall Association since the founding of its Art on the Malls program in 2005.

Scully, who for five decades has been celebrated for his stripe-based abstract paintings, has also won acclaim for his extensive body of drawings, prints and pastels. His “Broadway Shuffle” is the first exhibition in the United States to focus exclusively on his sculpture, a practice that has engaged him for more than twenty years. Like his paintings, with their blocks and bands of sensuous, sometimes smoldering color, the sculptures also offer a daring distillation of color and geometric form. Yet, in place of the soft-edged forms and intimations of landscape found in his paintings, the sculptures relate more closely to the hard forms of the city. Their grids and bands rise as high as 20 feet tall and echo the towering energy of New York. Although they belong to the high-art realm of abstract sculpture, they are also unusually relatable, providing viewers with a chance to experience art not within the confines of a gallery but outdoors, in the open air, in relation to the soaring architecture of the city.

As the art critic Lilly Wei recently commented, “I envision Sean’s stacked sculptures as a relay race up Broadway, marking and connecting us to all the different neighborhoods en route. It’s a kind of six-mile pilgrimage and I can’t wait to make it.”