The African American artist Richard Hunt creates abstract sculptures in public spaces infused with plant, animal, and human forms, and has worked with steel, aluminum, copper, and bronze. He is also a printmaker, with a focus on lithography. Born September 12, 1935, on the South Side of Chicago, Hunt participated in the Junior School of the Art Institute of Chicago summer program, where he studied under the German-born sculptor Nelli Bar. He had an interest in biology in addition to art making and worked in the genetics and zoology labs at the University of Chicago from 1951 until 1957, when he was awarded a BA in art education from the School of the Art Institute.[1]
Following graduation, Hunt was awarded the James Nelson Raymond Foreign Travel Fellowship from the School of the Art Institute, but while he was in Europe, he learned that he had been drafted. Upon his return, Hunt’s first two solo exhibitions were held in 1958 at the Alan Gallery in New York and the Fairweather Hardin Gallery in Chicago. He subsequently began his two-year military service and became the official US Army artist. In 1960–61, Hunt was an instructor at the Art Institute and until 1962 in the art and architecture department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 1962 he also became the youngest artist to exhibit artwork at the World’s Fair in Seattle. In 1964 he was a visiting artist at the Yale School of Art and a visiting professor at the California Institute of the Arts, then located in Los Angeles.[2]
Hunt was invited to serve on the National Council of the Arts by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968 and continued in that role until 1974. He became the first African American sculptor with a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York 1971. Hunt founded the Chicago Sculpture Society in 1982 and served as its founding president until 1988.[3] In an interview with the Terra Foundation for American Art, Hunt stated that public art had become “much more a part of the way the built environment is looked at by planners and developers. And it’s there for people to associate with, both in terms of ideas and in terms of opportunities to see things, to see art without going inside.”[4]
PMA Collection
PMA Library
PMA Archives
Photographs. Richard Hunt and Joan Miro exhibitions, Art Institute of Chicago, 1971, undated
Art Institute of Chicago. Incl. third party correspondence, 1971
References
Harris, Shawnya L. 2018. Richard Hunt: Synthesis. Athens, GA: Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia.
Obrist, Hans Ulrich, and Alison Cuddy. 2019. Creative Chicago: An Interview Marathon. Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art.
Smithsonian American Art Museum. “Richard Hunt.” Accessed February 10, 2021. https://americanart.si.edu/artist/richard-hunt-2357.
Endnotes
[1] Harris 2018; Obrist and Cuddy 2019; Smithsonian American Art Museum n.d.
[2] Harris 2018.
[3] Harris 2018; Smithsonian American Art Museum n.d.
[4] Quoted by Obrist and Cuddy 2019, 85.
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