Richard Hunt (sculptor)

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Richard Howard Hunt
Richard Hunt in Lill Street Studio Chicago 2018.jpg
Born (1935-09-12) September 12, 1935 (age 86)
Woodlawn, Chicago, Illinois, United States
NationalityAmerican
EducationSchool of the Art Institute of Chicago
OccupationSculptor
Years active1953 - Present
Known forSculpture, drawing, printmaking
Notable work
  • Arachne (1956)
  • Steel Bloom, Number 10 (1956)
  • (1958)
  • The Chase (1965)
  • (1976)
  • (1977)
  • Jacob's Ladder (1978)
  • Freeform (1993)
  • (1991-1996)
  • (2001)
  • We Will (2005)
  • Swing Low (2016)
  • (2014-2020)
Websitehttp://www.richardhunt.us

Richard Howard Hunt (born September 12, 1935) is one of the most important African American sculptors of the 20th-century.[1] Hunt holds status as one of the foremost African-American abstract sculptors and artists of public sculpture.[1] Hunt, the descendant of slaves, was the first African American sculptor to have a major retrospective at Museum of Modern Art in 1971. Hunt has created over 150 public sculpture commissions in prominent locations in 22 states across the United States, more than any other sculptor.[2] With a career that spans seven decades, Hunt has held over 100 solo exhibitions and is represented in more than 100 public museums. Hunt has served on the Smithsonian Institution's National Board of Directors. Hunt's abstract, modern and contemporary sculpture work is notable for its presence in exhibitions and public displays as early as the 1950s, despite social pressures for the obstruction of African-American art at the time.

Arachne, 1956 Museum of Modern Art
Steel Bloom, Number 10, 1956 at the Chicago Cultural Center, 2015

Early life[]

He was born in 1935 on Chicago's South Side. Hunt and his younger sister Marian grew up in South Side Chicago, but moved to Galesburg, Illinois at eleven years old where he spent the majority of his time in the city of Chicago.[3] From an early age he was interested in the arts, as his mother, an artist and librarian, would bring him to performances by local opera companies that sang classical repertoires of Mozart, Rossini, Verdi, and Handel.[4] As a young boy, Hunt began to show enthusiasm and talent in artistic disciplines such as drawing and painting, and also sculpture, an interest that grew more and more as he got older. Hunt was inspired to pursue his career in the arts because his family appreciated art and he clearly said "My mom was supportive and dad was tolerant."[5] In the seventh grade, Hunt attended the Junior School of Art Institute of Chicago where he began his interest in art.[6] Hunt also acquired business sense and awareness of social issues from working for his father in a barbershop.[7]

Hero Construction, 1958 at the Art Institute of Chicago, IL

As a teenager, Hunt began his work in sculpture, working in clay and carvings.[8] While his work started in a makeshift studio in his 1950 bedroom, he eventually built a basement studio in his father's barbershop.[8] He became the youngest exhibiting artist at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair.[9]

Education[]

Hunt graduated from Englewood High School in 1953 and entered the School of the Art Institute of Chicago that year. He was once interested in Surrealism where he experimented with the assemblage of broken machine parts and metals from the junkyard such as car bumpers and reshaping them into organic forms.[10] Hunt worked with materials of copper, iron and then to steel and aluminum which led to him to produce a series of "hybrid figures" which were references to human, animal and plant forms.[11] This is where Hunt attains a combination of organic and industrial subject matter in his artwork. Hunt studied at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1953 to 1957, focusing on welding sculptures, but also studying lithography.[12] His earliest works were more figural than his later ones, and usually represented classical themes.[4] Hunt began exhibiting his sculptures nationwide while still a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.[9] As a Junior, his piece "Arachne," was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.[9] He received a B.A.E. from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1957.[9]

European Travel[]

Symbiosis was a gift to Howard University by former school trustee Hobart Taylor.[13]

Upon graduating, Hunt was awarded the James Nelson Raymond Foreign Travel Fellowship[14][15] He sails to England on the SS United States and then to Paris, where he leases a car, a Citroën 2CV, for travel to Spain, Italy, and eventually back to Paris. He will spend most of his time in Europe in Italy, particularly in Florence, where he learns to cast and creates his first sculptures using that technique, in bronze, at the renowned Marinelli foundry.[9] His time abroad solidified his belief that metal was the definitive medium of the twentieth century.[12]

Military Service[]

During the fall of 1958 Hunt completes his basic training at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. He will go on to serve nearly two years in the United States Army from 1958 to 1960.[14] Hunt serves as an Army illustrator at Brooke Army Medical Center located within Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas.

Desegregation[]

March 7, 1960, Mary Andrews, president of the local youth council of the NAACP, writes letters to store managers in downtown San Antonio who operate white-only lunch counters. Encouraged by the growing sit-in movement, she requests equal services be provided to all, regardless of race. Hunt in uniform goes to lunch at Woolworth's on March 16, 1960, is seated at the counter, has his order taken, and is served without incident. Hunt, the only known African American to eat at San Antonio's Woolworth's lunch counter that day, fulfills Mary Andrews vision of integration. This action, along with a handful of other African Americans at other lunch counters across the city, make San Antonio the first peaceful and voluntary lunch counter integration in the south.[16]

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.[17] The Sculpture of the Twentieth Century included works of Pablo Picasso, Juilo Gonzalez, and David Smith.[5] At the exhibition, this was the first time Hunt saw various artworks of welded metal. In fact, Hunt was also inspired and paid respect to European sculptor Duchamp-Villon whose 1914 bronze "Horse" was instructional.[18] Seeing these artists' works led Hunt to created abstract shapes by welding metal.

Winged Form, 1987 sculpture in Chicago, IL

In the 1960s and 1970s, Hunt used car junkyards as his quarries and turned bumpers and fenders into abstract, welded sculptures.[4] Hunt also focused on linear-spatial arrangement of his materials where he followed Julio Gonzalez's footsteps into three dimensional structures.[19] This experimentation garnered critically positive response from the art community, such that Hunt was exhibited at the and the , 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.

In fact, Hunt received his first sculpture commission in 1967 known as Play, which was commissioned by the State of Illinois Public Art Program.[20] The making of this sculpture led him to many other public commissions and was considered to be his second career as a public sculptor. Hunt has completed more public sculptures than any other artist in the country.[2] His signature pieces include Jacob's Ladder at the in Chicago and Flintlock Fantasy in Detroit.

He was appointed by President Lyndon Johnson as one of the first artists to serve on the governing board of the National Endowment for the Arts and he also served on boards of the Smithsonian Institution.[citation needed] From 1980 to 1988, Hunt served as Commissioner of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American Art.[14] From 1994 to 1997, Hunt served on the Smithsonian Institution's National Board of Directors.[14] Hunt is the recipient of numerous awards and honorary degrees.

In 1971, Hunt acquired a deactivated electrical substation near northern Chicago and repurposed it into a metal welding sculpture studio. The station came equipped with a bridge crane, which was convenient for moving large sculpture pieces, and a spacious 40-foot ceiling. While handling the metal, Hunt works with two assistants.[21] Hunt describes metalworks as "free play of forms evolving, developing and contrasting with one another."[22]

Flintlock Fantasy or the Promise of Force, 1991-1996

Hunt has continued to experiment throughout his successful career, employing a wide range of sculptural techniques. Through his work, Hunt often makes comments on contemporary social and political issues.

We Will made in 2005, displayed in Chicago, IL

Statements by Richard Hunt [23][]

Out of a number of possible bases for judging art, the dominance of the style peculiar to any given period always makes one basis more tenable than the rest; but, this criterion is always tempered by the prevailing intellectual and social climate, and is further modulated by seasonal highs and lows. Thus, the critical basis of art is as everchanging as the work it seeks to evaluate, but the development of criticism of necessity follows the development of art.

Most beautiful to me are the buds opened by González, whose influence has been important in my development. The influence of some primitive and Renaissance sculpture has been significant. There has been passing interest in Brancusi, Marini, Noguchi, Roszak, and Goto, fleeting interest in Butler, Chadwick, Stankiewicz, and other

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.

A sculptor can be thought of as the sort of person who can reduce impressions of things, responses, and ideas about things into sculptural forms. Sometimes these sculptural forms are simply sculptural forms; sometimes these forms can be formed into sculptures. The creation of a sculpture can be considered the process by which a sculptor demonstrates to himself whether or not he is creating a sculpture.

Everything that exists, natural or man made, contains some sculptural quality or property. I try to appropriate the sculpturalness of any of these forms into my work whenever they seem a reasonable extension of my current vocabulary of forms.

One hopes to see from what has been done, what can be done.

One of the central themes in my work is the reconciliation of the organic and the industrial. I see my work as forming a kind of bridge between what we experience in nature and what we experience from the urban, industrial, technology-driven society we live in. I like to think that within the work that I approach most successfully there is a resolution of the tension between the sense of freedom one has in contemplating nature and the sometimes restrictive, closed feeling engendered by the rigors of the city, the rigors of the industrial environment.

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.

Richard Hunt Freeform, 1993 Chicago, IL

Selected Awards[]

Honorary Degrees[]

Selected Works[]

Selected Public Collections[26][]

References[]

  1. ^ a b "Richard Hunt | Smithsonian American Art Museum". americanart.si.edu. Retrieved 2021-04-04.
  2. ^ a b "Richard Hunt". www.arts.gov. Retrieved 2021-04-04.
  3. ^ "Richard Hunt". The American Mosaic: The African American Experience. 2017.
  4. ^ a b c Perry, Regenia A. (1992). Free within Ourselves: African American Artists in the Collection of the National Museum of American Art. Smithsonian Inst. pp. 91–93.
  5. ^ a b "Copper in the Arts Magazine: Thinking in Metal: Sculptor Richard Hunt". Copper.org. Retrieved 2017-11-18.
  6. ^ "About". Richard Hunt. Retrieved 2017-12-19.
  7. ^ "Richard Hunt". Thehistorymakers.com. Retrieved 12 December 2017.
  8. ^ a b "Richard Howard Hunt - Artist, Fine Art Prices, Auction Records for Richard Howard Hunt". Askart.com. Retrieved 12 December 2017.
  9. ^ a b c d e "About Richard Hunt". Richardhuntstudio.com. Retrieved 12 December 2017.
  10. ^ Patton, Sharon (1998). African-American Art. Oxford University Press.
  11. ^ Marter, Joan (2011). The Grove encyclopedia of American art. 1. Oxford: New York: Oxford University Press.
  12. ^ a b "Richard Howard Hunt - Artist Biography for Richard Howard Hunt". Askart.com. Retrieved 12 December 2017.
  13. ^ "Howard University Libraries". Howard.edu. Retrieved 12 December 2017.
  14. ^ a b c d "Resume". Richardhuntstudio.com. Retrieved 12 December 2017.
  15. ^ "Untitled - The Art Institute of Chicago". Artic.edu. Retrieved 12 December 2017.
  16. ^ "Richard Hunt in San Antonio". Vince Michael. 2021-03-21. Retrieved 2021-04-03.
  17. ^ "Richard Hunt". Smithsonian American Art Museum. Retrieved 2017-12-05.
  18. ^ Glueck, Grace (1997). "Metal Sculptures Bucking the Trends". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2017-11-19.
  19. ^ The sculpture of Richard Hunt (PDF). New York, N.Y.: Museum of Modern Art. 2016 [1971]. ISBN 978-0870703768.
  20. ^ "About". Richard Hunt. Retrieved 2017-11-16.
  21. ^ Getlein, Frank (1990). Combining the root with the reach of black aspiration. Smithsonian. p. 60.
  22. ^ MacMillan, Kyle (3 Dec 2014). "Two Exhibitions Celebrate Chicago Artist Richard Hunt; the Chicago Cultural Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Celebrate Richard Hunt". The Wall Street Journal.
  23. ^ "The Sculpture of Richard Hunt" (PDF). MoMA.
  24. ^ "John Simon Guggenheim Foundation | Richard Hunt". Retrieved 2020-04-27.
  25. ^ International Sculpture Center website. 'Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award page'. Retrieved 24 January 2010.
  26. ^ "Public Collections". Richard Hunt. Retrieved 2017-12-05.

Sources[]

  • Payne, Les (1997). "The Life and Art of Richard Hunt". Newsday (January 9): Sect. B, pp. 6–7, 23.
  • Brockington, Horace (1997). "Richard Hunt, The Studio Museum in Harlem". Review (January 15): 10–12.
  • Schmerler, Sarah (October 1997). "Richard Hunt, The Studio Museum in Harlem". Sculpture: 54–55.
  • Baltimore Museum of Art, and Jay McKean Fisher. Prints by a Sculptor: Richard Hunt. Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 1979.
  • Castro, Jan Garden (May–June 1998). "Richard Hunt: Freeing the Human Soul". Sculpture: 34–39. Retrieved 2009-02-28.
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