As Hunt nears 80, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Cultural Center mine nearly 60 years of the artist's work.
Last December, the Chicago-born sculptor Richard Hunt died at the age of 88. The prolific artist was born in Woodlawn, blocks from the home of Emmett Till, whose brutal murder helped shape the course of Hunt's career.
As a young man, Hunt took art classes at the South Side Community Art Center and later earned a degree at the School of the Art Institute. Early in his career, he chose to focus on welding metal -- garnering the attention of curators and politicians alike. He was just 35 when MOMA staged a retrospective of his work, which Hunt's studio notes was "the first retrospective for an African American sculptor at the museum."
Though Hunt lived outside the city for periods throughout his life -- including a stint in the army -- he was a Chicagoan through and through. In 2023, Hunt was still making his signature, stately works out of his Lincoln Park studio. As the New York Times reported, one of Hunt's final pieces, Hero Ascending, will be installed outside the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley House.
In this 2014 article, originally titled "Chicago sculptor Richard Hunt's six-decade career gets two concurrent exhibits," Aimee Levitt highlights solo shows Hunt had that year -- two Chicago institutions giving the artist his flowers while he was here to appreciate them.
-- Kerry Cardoza, culture editor
When the sculptor Richard Hunt was still a student at the School of the Art Institute, he sold a piece to the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York. That was back in 1957; Hunt was 22. When he was 35, in 1971, MOMA mounted the first retrospective of his work. Hunt is nearing 80 now, but he continues to work in his Lincoln Park studio, welding industrial metal into art. Several pieces from his personal collection, covering the full range of his nearly 60-year-long career, from his student days through work currently in progress, is on display at the Chicago Cultural Center through March. The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) salutes Hunt with a retrospective, opening this week, featuring pieces (mostly) drawn from its own collection.
"It's rare to see an artist active for so long," says Naomi Beckwith, the MCA curator who put the exhibit together. "You can see how things have shifted from his early work, the shift in scale, the shift in form. The early work is more figurative, but the later work pushes toward real abstraction."
That's certainly not to say Hunt is inaccessible -- his sculptures have appeared everywhere, from the offices of Playboy Enterprises to Midway airport.
Although Hunt wasn't the first artist to work with industrial materials -- he was strongly influenced by the Spanish sculptor Julio González, whose work was shown in Chicago in the 50s -- he stands out, Beckwith says, because of the expressiveness of his forms. Unlike his contemporary Tony Smith, who embraced minimalism, Hunt, in his sculpture, sought to re-create the fluid lines of drawing. Along the way, he also became a master welder. While in his earlier output it's possible to see the seams, his later sculptures look like, as Beckwith puts it, "one solid piece of metal extending into space."
"The material doesn't look like it should be able to do the things it does," she says. "There's a sense of vivacity -- of aliveness and energy. There's metal all around us, in buildings and in our cars, but it's a magical moment to watch metal transform from something mundane and utilitarian into something poetic."