Richard Hunt

EARLY LIFE

Richard Howard Hunt was born in Chicago, Illinois, on 12 September 1935 to Etoria Inez Henderson Hunt and Cleophus Howard Hunt. In 1940, the family, including Hunt’s younger sister Marian Eustacia Hunt, settled in Chicago’s Englewood neighbourhood, where Hunt attended school.

Hunt grew up in an environment where religion, culture, politics and music were a constant presence. Raised as part of the congregations of the African Methodist Episcopal and Baptist churches, community and the spiritual impulse were deeply embedded in Hunt’s psyche. Equally important were his many visits to the free public museums with his mother, a librarian, and the lively discussions that took place in his father’s barbershop.

In 1948, at 13, he enrolled at the Junior School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the following year he took his first sculpture class. Under the guidance of the sculptor Nelli Bar and later Egon Weiner, both of whom were Jewish artists who had fled Nazi Germany, Hunt deepened his commitment to sculpture, transforming his bedroom into a personal studio where he worked primarily in clay and plaster.

EMMETT TILL 

In 1955, at the age of 19, Hunt was among the thousands of mourners in Bronzeville, on Chicago’s South Side, who attended the funeral of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American boy. That summer, Till had been brutally tortured and lynched while visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, which, post-enslavement, remained subject to segregation, discrimination and intimidation under legislation collectively known as the Jim Crow Laws. At the insistence of Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, when his brutalised body was brought back to Chicago for burial, the casket was kept open for all to see ‘what they did to my boy’.

Hunt was deeply impacted by this experience, which informed both his creative expression and commitment to the Civil Rights movement in the years that followed. In the immediate aftermath, he created two works as a direct response: Prometheus (1956), where Till’s suffering is linked to the myth of the god of fire, and Hero’s Head (1956), which immortalised the image of Till’s disfigured head in welded steel.

MILITARY SERVICE

Hunt was forced to return to the US in 1958 to undertake his military service. Stationed at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, he was initially drafted to serve as a medic but succeeded in changing his assignment to that of an illustrator.

Having recently begun to achieve some commercial success with his work, Hunt was able to rent a house on the base typically reserved for non-commissioned officers. In doing so, he became the only private, and the first African American, to integrate. Hunt’s commitment to the Civil Rights movement extended into peaceful protest. In the spring of 1960, towards the end of his service, Hunt – along with two companions who were white – entered a whites-only Woolworth’s drugstore and sat at the lunch counter in a peaceful, determined act of conscience.

While in the army, Hunt continued to pursue his sculptural practice, sharing a studio with a local painter and initiating his explorations of linear-spatial configurations using salvaged metal parts. Following his early discharge, he dismantled some of these initial works, repurposing their components to cultivate new, hybrid forms that extended through space in ways that manifested as three-dimensional ‘drawings’. The expansive, open-form series that emerged from this process would come to represent some of the most significant sculptures of his early career.

‘My career as a sculptor has led me to pursue a quest for freedom not unlike that day in San Antonio.’ – Richard Hunt

MoMA RETROSPECTIVE

‘The theme of much of my work can be characterised as a fusion or harmonisation of the vital tensions existing between dualities, such as the organic and the geometric, the organic and the abstract, or the past and the present, the traditional and the contemporary.’ – Richard Hunt

In 1971, at just 35, Hunt became one of the youngest artists and the first African American sculptor to be honoured with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Featuring 55 sculptures, including Man on a Vehicular Construction (1956) and Coil (1965), and 20 works on paper, the exhibition surveyed the development of Hunt’s practice over the preceding 15 years: from his early ‘found object’ works, through his linear ‘drawings-in-space’, to the denser, monolithic forms of the late 1960s. The retrospective was the most expansive showcase the museum had devoted to an African American artist to date.

FLIGHT, GROWTH AND ASCENSION

The abstracted forms of flight, growth and ascension in Hunt’s art symbolise freedom and recur in many of the public sculptures that constitute his legacy. Inspired by ancient mythologies – and specifically by The Winged Victory of Samothrace (c.190 BCE), which Hunt encountered as a young artist – winged forms became his favoured motif. Equally, the natural world is reflected in the determined sense of upward movement and growth present in so many of Hunt’s sculptures.

In 1994, 1997 and 1999, Hunt was invited to exhibit his sculptures in the White House Garden in Washington, DC, as part of an initiative begun by Hillary Clinton. Recognition of his achievements and contribution to the arts continued throughout the final decades of his life: in 1998, Hunt was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2009, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center; and in 2022, he was honoured with the Legends & Legacy Award at the Art Institute of Chicago.

At the time of his death, on 16 December 2023, Richard Hunt stood as one of the most respected and acclaimed American sculptors of the 20th century, with more than 170 solo exhibitions during his lifetime and representation in the collections of 125 museums worldwide.