Hyperallergic Members are invited to join us on November 5, 2025, for a virtual conversation between two leading voices in contemporary art. Poet, critic, and curator John Yau will sit down with internationally acclaimed artist Sean Scully for a conversation about his decades-long career, recent work, and advice for young artists. Read Yau’s review of Scully’s work.
The virtual conversation, moderated by Hrag Vartanian, will take place on Wednesday, November 5, from 2 to 3pm (ET), and will be followed by an opportunity for members to ask questions.
All members are welcome to register for this free event. Not a member yet? Join now to attend.
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If you have any questions, please contact us at support@hyperallergic.com.
John Yau is an award-winning poet, critic, curator, and publisher of Black Square Editions. He has published over 50 books of poetry, fiction, and art criticism, as well as monographs on the work of Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and A. R. Penck.
Yau received the Jackson Poetry Prize in 2018, the Rabkin Prize in 2021, and an American Book Award in 2024 for the collection of essays Please Wait by the Coatroom: Reflections on Race and Identity in American Art. His latest collection of poetry, Diary of Small Discontents; New and Selected Poems 1974−2024, was recently released.
He is a Professor Emeritus at the Mason Gross School of the Arts and Rutgers University, and is a longtime contributor to Hyperallergic.
Sean Scully RA (born June 30, 1945) is an Irish-born, American-based artist working as a painter, printmaker, sculptor, and photographer. Moving from London to New York in 1975, Scully shifted the paradigm in abstraction from Minimalism to emotional abstraction in painting, abandoning the reduced vocabulary of the former in favor of a return to metaphor and spirituality in art.
Recent exhibitions in New York include the retrospective Sean Scully: The Albee Barn. Montauk, The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York, May 11–September 21, 2025, and Sean Scully: Broadway Shuffle, with seven outdoor sculptures placed along Broadway, Broadway Mall Association, New York, July 12, 2024–March 31, 2025.
Other international retrospectives this year include Sean Scully. Stories, Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg, Germany. June 27–November 2, 2025; Sean Scully: Sublime and Sunyata, Art Museum of Sichuan Conservatory of Music, Sichuan, China. June 12–October 12, 2025; Sean Scully: The Horizontal and The Vertical, Daegu Art Museum, Daegu, South Korea. March 18–August 17, 2025; and Sean Scully, Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera, Casa Milà, Barcelona, Spain. March 14–July 6, 2025. 2024 saw, among other major exhibitions, the opening of the room Sean Scully: A Romantic Geometry of Colors, in the collections of Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France. October 14, 2024–February 24, 2025.
A solo exhibition of new work, Sean Scully: Tower, will open at Lisson Gallery this November 2025, following last year’s critically acclaimed Lisson Gallery exhibition Sean Scully: Duane Street 1981-1983.
