Martin L. Puryear (born May 23, 1941) is an American artist known for his devotion to traditional craft. Working in a variety of media, but primarily wood, his reductive technique and meditative approach challenge the physical and poetic boundaries of his materials.
Puryear has participated in the Whitney Biennial three times and he has represented the United States multiple times with solo exhibitions at international biennials, including in 1989 at the São Paulo Biennial and in 2019 at the 58th Venice Biennale.
Early life and education Martin Puryear was born May 23, 1941, in Washington, D.C., to Reginald Puryear and Martina Puryear. His father and mother worked as a postal worker and teacher, respectively. Puryear was the eldest of seven children, with four brothers and two sisters.
Puryear attended Syphax Elementary in Washington before going on to graduate from Archbishop Carroll High School, a Catholic school in the Brookland neighborhood. He began exploring traditional craft methods in his youth, making guitars, canoes, and furniture. Puryear enrolled at the District of Columbia Teachers College in Fall 1958, primarily taking science courses. He transferred to The Catholic University of America after two years, originally studying biology before switching to art as a junior with a focus on painting. While an undergraduate, he learned about the Washington Color School painters, including faculty member Kenneth Noland, and he participated in several group exhibitions in the Washington area. Puryear graduated from Catholic with a BA in art in 1963.
After graduation, Puryear spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Sierra Leone. From 1966 to 1968, he studied printmaking at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm, funded by a grant from The American-Scandinavian Foundation. He returned to the United States in 1969 after receiving a grant to enroll in the graduate program at the Yale School of Art. Among his professors and visiting teachers at Yale were sculptors Robert Morris, James Rosati, Salvatore Scarpitta, and Richard Serra, and he became close with the painting faculty member Al Held. Puryear graduated from Yale in 1971 with an MFA in sculpture. Although he discovered Minimalism at a formative period in his development, Puryear would ultimately reject its impersonality and formalism.Elderfield, John, and Michael Auping, Martin Puryear. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007
Life and career 1971–1979 In 1971, Puryear was hired to teach at the historically black Fisk University in Tennessee, having been offered the position by art department chair David Driskell.
Puryear staged his first solo art exhibition in the United States in January 1972 at the Henri 2 Gallery in Washington. The show received positive coverage from local critics.
Puryear staged his second solo exhibition at Henri 2 Gallery in 1973. He also left Fisk in 1973 and moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In 1974, he accepted a job offer at the University of Maryland, College Park, and began spending half of each week in both New York and Maryland.
In 1977, following a devastating fire in his Brooklyn studio, Puryear moved to Chicago and began teaching at the University of Illinois. In the summer of 1977, Puryear developed an outdoor installation for Artpark in Niagara County, New York. His work, Box and Pole, consisted of a 100 foot tall wooden pole placed next a 54-inch wooden cube and opened to the public in August 1977. The same month, he opened a two-room exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, his first solo museum show. He exhibited a seventeen foot tall yurt-like wooden structure covered in animal hides that visitors could enter in the first room, along with a series of smaller sculptures in the second room.
In 1979, Puryear was included in the Whitney Biennial at New York's Whitney Museum. He also staged a solo exhibition at Protetch-McIntosh Gallery in Washington in 1979, showing a number of circular sculptures hung flat on the wall, made of various types of wood.
1980–1989 In 1980, Puryear opened a small solo exhibition at the Joslyn Art Museum in Nebraska. He exhibited five new wood and stone sculptures, all abstract variations of a form similar to a mound or shark's tooth. The same year, several of Puryear's wall-based wood circle sculptures were featured in the traveling group exhibition Afro-American Abstraction, a show exploring contemporary abstract art by African Americans, curated by April Kingsley and originating at the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York. He participated in the Whitney Biennial again in 1981.
Puryear staged a solo exhibition in February 1982 at Washington's McIntosh/Drysdale Gallery, showing new circular, wall-based works made of wood. Most of the sculptures comprised partial or imperfect circles hung on the wall, each with different stained or painted surface techniques and colors. During the Summer of 1982, Puryear worked on a commission for Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, creating a permanent public sculpture commemorating the university's 150th anniversary, which was unveiled in October 1982. His commissioned sculpture, Sentinel, a large wall-like concrete and stone form with rocks embedded in its surface, was funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Also that Summer, he completed a commission for Governors State University in Illinois, building a large-scale land art piece titled Bodark Arc. The work consisted of two pathways in the form of a broad arc bisected by a straight line, with each path leading to a cast bronze chair sculpture. Puryear was also awarded a John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Grant in 1982.
In 1983, Puryear completed Knoll for NOAA, a commission for a park on the site of a NOAA facility near Seattle. The work consisted of a dome of concrete forty-five feet in diameter and rising to a height of five feet, covered in a spiral double helix pattern made of glass pieces and surrounded by four curved concrete benches and maple trees. He travelled to Japan in October 1983 using funds from his Guggenheim grant, where he studied religious and residential architecture as well as traditional Japanese crafts.
The University Gallery at the University of Massachusetts Amherst organized the first traveling museum survey of Puryear's work in 1984, exhibiting his art from the previous ten years. The same year, Puryear was included in the group exhibition "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a controversial exhibition aiming to explore the connections between 20th century western art and mainly non-western, so-called primitive art. He showed a large wall piece made of wire, his first wall-based work in that material.
In January 1985, Puryear opened his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles at Margo Leavin Gallery, showing a range of new sculptures including works from his Boy's Toys series, all comprising small wooden forms attached to wooden rods, which several critics visually compared to phalluses or toilet plungers. He exhibited several of his Boy's Toys sculptures in a solo show in August 1985 at the University Art Museum, Berkeley, as part of the museum's MATRIX exhibition series. Puryear staged a solo exhibition at Chicago's Donald Young Gallery in October 1985. He presented the show across two gallery locations, exhibiting wall-based sculptures in one gallery and several large freestanding works in a separate location. The same year, he completed a commission for the River Road station in Chicago, permanently installing River Road Ring. The work, a monumental wooden circle sculpture, was suspended from the ceiling in the station's open atrium. Also in 1985, Puryear submitted a final design for a commission titled Arc at York College in Queens. The sculpture, completed in the ensuing three years, comprised a large skeletal form of copper tubes suspended from the ceiling in a long, narrow space in the college's interior walking mall.
In 1986, Puryear married Jeanne Gordon, an artist and classical pianist. The Chicago Cultural Center organized a ten-year survey of Puryear's work in February 1987. He opened a solo exhibition in April 1987 at the Carnegie Mellon University Art Gallery in Pittsburgh, showing several sculptures and drawings. In September 1987, Puryear presented another solo show at Donald Young Gallery in Chicago, primarily centered around a monumental work stretching 30 feet across the gallery, comprising a skeletal cone made from reeds attached to an oblong form of wire mesh covered in tar. He staged a solo show at New York's McKee Gallery in November 1987, his first commercial gallery show in the city.
Puryear opened a solo exhibition at McIntosh/Drysdale Gallery in Washington in March 1988, his first in the city in over five years. He showed several wall-based wood sculptures crafted so the thinned wood appeared to flow like a liquid. In October 1988, he participated in a four-artist show at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington as part of the Spectrum exhibition series, showing a new bird-like iron sculpture as well as several older works. He was commissioned by New York's Brooklyn Museum in November 1988 to create an installation for the museum's large atrium, reworking two previous monumental wood and mixed media pieces, one vertical and one horizontal, to fit the tall space. Puryear also completed a commission for the newly opened Minneapolis Sculpture Garden in 1988 titled Ampersand, comprising two large tapered granite columns, one upside down and one right side up, which framed an entrance to the garden.
Puryear staged another solo exhibition at Margo Leavin Gallery in L.A. in April 1989, showing a number of new wood sculptures. He was also included in the Whitney Biennial again in April 1989. In July 1989, Puryear was awarded the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
In October 1989, Puryear represented the United States at the São Paulo Biennial in Brazil, becoming the first black artist to represent the United States with a solo show at a major international biennial. His presentation, curated by Kellie Jones and featuring nine large sculptures mostly made of wood, was awarded the grand prize of the biennial.
1990–1999 In 1990, Puryear was the inaugural participant in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's Connections exhibitions series, creating new work in response to art from the museum's collection. Taking inspiration from a 17th-century painting of a falcon, he built a wooden yurt structure with gridded wooden slats, surrounded by abstract birdlike works made from wood, iron, bronze, and rawhide, all arranged on ledges on the walls.
The Art Institute of Chicago mounted a twenty-year traveling retrospective of Puryear's art in 1991, featuring forty works. The same year, Puryear was introduced to the choreographer Garth Fagan and began a collaboration on Fagan's dance work Griot New York. Puryear designed the elaborate sculptural wooden sets for the piece, a reflection on the African diasporic community and culture of New York City, which premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in December 1991. He participated in Documenta 9 in Kassel, Germany, in June 1992, installing a sculpture of a chained animal in a cage.
Puryear staged a solo exhibition in March 1995 at McKee Gallery, his first in New York since 1987. He showed four new sculptures, including several bulbous circular wood sculptures and a tall columnar work. Also in 1995, Puryear completed a commission in Battery Park City, installing two large stainless steel pylon sculptures on the shoreline at the North Cove Marina.