Zigzagging Between Public and Private: Tom Burr on Philip Johnson, Sexuality, and Architecture

Tom Burr’s sculpture Zog (a series of setbacks), on view in the exhibition Question the Wall Itself, takes its name and inspiration from a feature of Minneapolis’s Philip Johnson–designed IDS Center, the building’s zigzagging glass profile. Burr’s aim: to examine dualities of inside and outside, playing the modernist architect’s hard-edged corporate facades against his softer domestic architecture and personal story—“a mid-century homosexual who lived in a glass house.”