Richard Howard Hunt (September 12, 1935 – December 16, 2023) was an American sculptor.[2] In the second half of the 20th century, he became "the foremost African-American abstract sculptor and artist of public sculpture."[3] Hunt, the descendant of enslaved people brought from West Africa through the Port of Savannah, studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1950s. While there he received multiple prizes for his work. In 1971, he was the first African-American sculptor to have a retrospective at Museum of Modern Art. Hunt has created over 160 public sculpture commissions, more than any other sculptor[4] in prominent locations in 24 states across the United States.
With a career spanning seven decades, Hunt held over 150 solo exhibitions and is represented in more than 100 public museums across the world. His notable abstract, modern and contemporary sculpture work appeared in exhibitions and public displays as early as the 1950s. He was one of the first artists to serve on the governing body for National Endowment for the Arts and later served on the board of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 2022, Barack Obama stated that "Richard Hunt is one of the greatest artists Chicago has ever produced."[5][6]
Richard Hunt was born in 1935 on Chicago's South Side and raised in the Woodlawn neighborhood. Hunt and his younger sister, Marian, grew up there.[1] Although he moved to Galesburg, Illinois at eleven years old, he spent the majority of his time in the city of Chicago.[7][8] From an early age he was interested in the arts. Accompanying his mother, a beautician and librarian, he attended performances by local opera companies that sang classical repertoires of Mozart, Rossini, Verdi, and Handel.[9]
As a young boy, Hunt began to show enthusiasm and talent for drawing, painting, and sculpting, interests that he increasingly developed. Inspired to pursue his career in the arts, he stated "My mom was supportive and dad was tolerant."[10] Hunt also acquired business sense and awareness of social issues from working in his father's barbershop.[11]
As a teenager, Hunt began his work in sculpture, working with clay, carving wood, and modeling Sculpt-Metal.[12] While his work started in a makeshift studio in his 1940s bedroom, he eventually built a basement studio in his father's barbershop and later a basement studio in the family's Englewood home.[12]
While studying at the Art Institute, Hunt focused first on creating soldered wire figures, then on welding sculptures, and additionally producing lithographs.[14][8] Interested in Modernism, Abstract Expressionism, and Surrealism, he experimented with the assemblage of broken machine parts, car bumpers, and metals from the junkyard reshaping them into organic forms.[16] Hunt went on to work with iron, steel, copper, and aluminum producing a series of "hybrid figures", references to human, animal, and plant forms.[17] Hunt explored the interplay of organic and industrial subject matter in his artwork. His earliest works, often represented classical themes, were more figural than his later ones.[9]
Hunt began exhibiting his sculptures nationwide while still a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.[18][19] As a Junior, his piece Arachne was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.[18][19] He received a bachelor's of arts in education (BAE) from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1957.[18]
From the Sea, 1983, welded bronze, 71 × 45 × 64 in. (180 × 114 × 163 cm)
Emmett Till
In 1955, Hunt attended the funeral of Emmett Till at the Roberts Temple Church in Chicago. The open-casket funeral showed Till's face, mutilated and disfigured from having been lynched. This experience had a profound impact on Hunt.[20] Till had grown up in Woodlawn only a few blocks from the home where Hunt was born.[13][21] Hunt, like Till, traveled South to visit family.[2] The sculpture "Hero's Head", 1956 (representing the lynched head of Till) was one of the first welded sculptures that Hunt created. He witnessed Till's funeral and taught himself how to weld the very same summer. On January 6, 2003, Hunt would also attend Mamie Till's funeral out of reverence for what she did for her child and for the Civil Rights movement as a whole.[2]
In 2023, Hunt finished a sculptural model for the monument Hero Ascending, a tribute to Emmett Till which will be installed at Till's childhood home.[21][22]
European travel
Richard Hunt's Symbiosis was given to Howard University as a gift by former school trustee Hobart Taylor.[23]
Upon graduating, Hunt was awarded the James Nelson Raymond Foreign Travel Fellowship.[24][25] He sailed to England on the SS United States and then to Paris, where he leased a car, a Citroën 2CV, for travel to Spain, Italy, and eventually back to Paris. He spent most of his time in Florence, where he learned to cast his first sculptures in bronze, at the renowned Marinelli foundry.[18] His time abroad solidified his belief that metal was the definitive medium of the twentieth century.[14]
On March 7, 1960, Mary Andrews, president of the local youth council of the NAACP, wrote letters to store managers in downtown San Antonio, Texas, who operated white-only lunch counters. Encouraged by the growing sit-in movement, she requested equal services be provided to all, regardless of race. Hunt in U.S. Army uniform went to lunch at Woolworth's on March 16, 1960. Seated at the counter, his order was taken, and he was served without incident. Hunt, the only known African American to eat at San Antonio's Woolworth's lunch counter that day, fulfilled Mary Andrews's vision of integration. This action, along with a handful of other African Americans at other lunch counters across the city, made San Antonio the first peaceful and voluntary lunch counter integration in the south.[26][21]
Career
Hunt began to experiment with materials and sculpting techniques, influenced heavily by progressive twentieth-century artists. Hunt was inspired to focus on sculpture because of the 1950s exhibition called the Sculpture of the Twentieth Century that was held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1953.[27] The Sculpture of the Twentieth Century included works of Pablo Picasso, Julio González, and David Smith.[10][19] At the exhibition, Hunt for the first time saw various artworks of welded metal. Hunt was also inspired and paid respect to French sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon whose 1914 bronze "Horse" was instructional.[28] Seeing these artists' works led Hunt to teach himself how to solder wire to create small figures. He would later go on to create both figurative and abstract shapes by learning to weld metal in 1955.[10]
Winged Form, 1987, Chicago, IL
In the 1960s and 1970s, Hunt used car junkyards as his quarries and turned bumpers and fenders into abstract, welded sculptures.[9] Hunt also focused on linear-spatial arrangement of his materials where he followed Julio González's footsteps into three-dimensional structures.[19][29] This experimentation garnered critically positive response from the art community, such that Hunt was exhibited at the Artists of Chicago and Vicinity Show and the American Show, where the Museum of Modern Art purchased a piece for its collection. He was the youngest artist to exhibit at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair, a major international survey exhibition of modern art.[18]
Hunt received his first sculpture commission in 1967 known as Play, which was commissioned by the State of Illinois Public Art Program.[30] The making of this sculpture led him to many other public commissions considered to be his second career. Hunt completed more public sculptures than any other artist in the country.[4] His signature pieces include Jacob's Ladder at the Carter G. Woodson Library in Chicago[31] and Flintlock Fantasy in Detroit.[32]
In 1971, Hunt acquired a deactivated electrical substation near northern Chicago and repurposed it into a metal welding sculpture studio.[35] The station came equipped with a bridge crane, which was convenient for moving large sculpture pieces, and a spacious 40-foot (12 m) ceiling. While handling the metal, Hunt worked with two assistants.[36] Hunt described metalworks as "free play of forms evolving, developing and contrasting with one another."[35]
Flintlock Fantasy or the Promise of Force, 1991–1996Slowly Toward the North, 1984, welded Cor-Ten steel, 59"H × 34"W × 84"D (150 × 86 × 213 cm). The sculpture commemorates the Great Migration.[37]
In 2014, the Chicago Cultural Center celebrated Hunt's career to date with the exhibition Sixty Years of Sculpture.[38]
On February 26, 2022, the Obama Foundation announced the commission of the sculpture Book Bird for the Barack Obama Presidential Center.[21][39] The sculpture which was completed, is an elaboration from a piece Hunt created as an award to supporters of the United Negro College Fund. The Obama Foundation stated, "This beautiful piece encapsulates the progress one can make through reading—embodying the inspiration we hope all young people take away when they visit the Obama Presidential Center." Barack Obama told Hunt, "I've been a huge admirer of your work for a long time, and Michelle has as well."[5][40]
A 352-page volume on the seven-decade career of Richard Hunt was published in 2022.[13][2][41] It includes a foreword, three scholarly essays, an in-depth interview, and an extensive illustrated chronology of Hunt's life. The volume features an introduction by Courtney J. Martin, text by John Yau, Jordan Carter, and LeRonn Brooks, an interview by Adrienne Childs, and a chronology by Jon Ott.[42]Oprah Daily declared it as "A lavish, trenchant retrospective of our most prominent Black sculptors."[43]
The Getty Research Institute acquired the archive of Richard Hunt in October 2022.[44][13] The Richard Hunt archive contains approximately 800 linear feet of detailed notes and correspondence, notebooks, sketchbooks, photographic documentation, financial records, research, ephemera, blueprints, posters, drawings, and lithographs, as well as a selection of wax models for public sculptures. "Richard Hunt is one of the foremost American artists of the mid- to late-20th century," says LeRonn Brooks, associate curator for modern and contemporary collections. "I am thrilled that Getty, whom I first became affiliated with through my participation in the Getty Center for Education in the Arts during the 1980s, will be the home of my archive," says Richard Hunt. "The entirety of my papers, photographs, letters, and sketches trace the arc of my career and my contribution to art history. I hope that my archive will serve not only as a remembrance but an inspiration to others."[44]
In November 2023, White Cube announced representation of Richard Hunt and an exhibition of his work at their New York gallery.[37]
Museum of Modern Art
Hunt's work has been exhibited 12 times at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, including a major solo retrospective in 1971, when Hunt was only 35 years old. Titled The Sculpture of Richard Hunt, March 25 – July 9, 1971, he became the first African American sculptor to be given a retrospective by MoMA.[20][45]
In some works it is my intention to develop the kind of forms nature might create if only heat and steel were available to her.
Everything that exists, natural or man made, contains some sculptural quality or property.
One of the central themes in my work is the reconciliation of the organic and the industrial.
I must, I can, I will provide the physical evidence of me and my family having lived upon this earth, this planet. In the great scheme of things it is less than a drop in the bucket but it pleases me to be able to leave this evidence here for a time.
Imagining a world without racial hierarchy, I work as if race did not exist.
Sculpture is not a self-declaration but a voice of and for my people. Over all a rich fabric; under all about the dynamism of the African American people.
I have always been interested in the concept of freedom on the personal and universal levels: political freedom, freedom to think and to feel. As an African American living in the United States, obviously issues like segregation laws, the civil rights movement in the 1960s or South Africa have been on my mind when I have dealt with the concept of freedom. But freedom also relates to my career as an artist: freedom of mind, thought and imagination.
My own use of winged forms in the early '50s is based on mythological themes, like Icarus and Winged Victory. It's about, on the one hand, trying to achieve victory or freedom internally. It's also about investigating ideas of personal and collective freedom. My use of these forms has roots and resonances in the African-American experience and is also a universal symbol.[2][47]
Death
Hunt died on December 16, 2023, at his Chicago home. According to a statement posted to his website, he "passed away peacefully". He was 88.[20][48][49]
Accolades and works
Hunt was the recipient of numerous awards and honorary degrees.[2]
^ abcdefghijBrooks, LeRonn P.; Carter, Jordan; Childs, Adrienne L.; Yau, John; Ott, Jon (2022). Richard Hunt. Gregory R. Miller & Company. ISBN978-1-941366-44-8. Retrieved December 17, 2023.
^ abcPerry, Regenia A. (1992). Free within Ourselves: African American Artists in the Collection of the National Museum of American Art. Smithsonian Inst. pp. 91–93.
