LongHouse Talk: Sean Scully in Conversation with Karen Wilkin

Join us for a dialogue between world-renowned abstract artist Sean Scully and acclaimed curator and critic Karen Wilkin, celebrating the installation of Scully’s monumental, 20-foot-tall colored stack sculpture, 48 (2024), which stands as a centerpiece of LongHouse’s 2026 season of Art in the Garden.

Wilkin and Scully will delve into his decades-long career, exploring the profound influence of landscape, rhythms of nature, and coastal light on his practice—from his transformative 1982 residency in Montauk to his recent masterworks. Following the talk, attendees are invited to view 48 alongside the artist.

All are welcome to continue exploring the Art in the Garden, including other recent additions by Renee Cox, William Kentridge, and Fitzhugh Karol.

Dublin-born Sean Scully is widely regarded as one of the greatest living abstract painters. Raised in South London, he moved to the United States in 1975 on a Harkness Fellowship, eventually becoming an American citizen and establishing his primary studio practice in New York. Over a career spanning more than five decades, Scully has forged a singular path in contemporary art, breaking away from the cold, rigid minimalism of the 1970s to inject deep emotion, human vulnerability, and historical resonance into abstract geometry. His signature use of stripes and grids navigates the elemental bonds of land, sea, and sky.

Karen Wilkin is a New York-based curator and critic. The author of monographs on Stuart Davis, David Smith, Anthony Caro, Kenneth Noland, and Giorgio Morandi, among others, she has organized exhibitions of their work internationally. She writes regularly for Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, The New Criterion, and the Wall Street Journal and teaches in the M.F.A. program of the New York Studio School. Current projects include a Larry Poons retrospective for the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.