Richard Howard Hunt (September 12, 1935 – December 16, 2023) was an American artist and sculptor. In the second half of the 20th century, he became "the foremost African-American abstract sculptor and artist of public sculpture." A Chicago native, Hunt studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1950s. While there he received multiple prizes for his work. In 1971, he was the first African-American sculptor to have a retrospective at Museum of Modern Art. Hunt has created over 160 public sculpture commissions, more than any other sculptor in prominent locations in 24 states across the United States.
With a career spanning seven decades, Hunt held over 170 solo exhibitions and is represented in more than 125 public museums across the world. His notable abstract, modern and contemporary sculpture and works on paper have appeared in museum and gallery exhibitions since the 1950s. Richard Hunt used “industrial materials and modern methods to sculpt organic forms and historical archetypes, such as freedom, flight, and progress” throughout his career.
He was one of the first artists to serve on the governing body for National Endowment for the Arts and later served on the board of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 2022, Barack Obama stated that "Richard Hunt is one of the greatest artists Chicago has ever produced."
Early life Richard Hunt was born in 1935 on Chicago's South Side and raised in the Woodlawn and Englewood neighborhoods. Hunt and his younger sister, Marian, grew up with their parents, Cleophus Howard Hunt, a barber, and Etoria Inez Henderson Hunt, a librarian and beautician. The Hunts were descendants of enslaved people brought from West Africa through the Port of Savannah, and often visited extended family in Georgia. Although he moved to Galesburg, Illinois at eleven years old, he spent the majority of his time in the city of Chicago. From an early age he was interested in the arts. Accompanying his mother, a beautician and librarian, he attended performances by local opera companies that sang classical repertoires of Mozart, Rossini, Verdi, and Handel.
As a young boy, Hunt began to show enthusiasm and talent for drawing, painting, and sculpting, interests that he increasingly developed. Inspired to pursue his career in the arts, he stated "My mom was supportive and dad was tolerant." Hunt also acquired business sense and awareness of social issues from working in his father's barbershop.
As a teenager, Hunt began his work in sculpture, working with clay, carving wood, and modeling Sculpt-Metal. While his work started in a makeshift studio in his 1940s bedroom, he eventually built a basement studio in his father's barbershop and later a basement studio in the family's Englewood home.
Education Beginning in the eighth grade at age 13, Hunt took classes at the Art Institute of Chicago's Junior School of the Arts. He graduated early from Englewood High School in January 1953 and entered the School of the Art Institute of Chicago later that year, and graduated in 1957. He also took classes at the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago.
While studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Hunt focused his sculptural work on creating soldered wire figures, then on welding sculptures, as well as producing drawings, paintings, and lithographs. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago did not have classes or materials suitable for learning welding, so he purchased his own welding equipment in 1955, and with little instruction, taught himself to weld in the basement studio of his father's barbershop. Interested in Modernism, Abstract Expressionism, and Surrealism, he experimented with the assemblage of broken machine parts, car bumpers, and metals from the junkyard reshaping them into organic forms. Hunt went on to work with iron, steel, copper, and aluminum producing a series of "hybrid figures", references to human, animal, and plant forms. Hunt explored the interplay of organic and industrial subject matter in his artwork. His earliest works, which often represented classical themes, are more figurative than his later works.
Hunt began exhibiting his sculptures nationwide while still a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1957 as a senior, his piece Arachne (1956) was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He received a bachelor's of arts in education (BAE) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago that same year.
Notable degrees In addition to his studies, Hunt received eighteen honorary degrees from universities all over the country. Some of which include the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL), Northwestern University (Evanston, IL), Tufts University (Medford, MA), and the University of Notre Dame (Notre Dame, IN).
European travel
Upon graduating, Hunt was awarded the James Nelson Raymond Foreign Travel Fellowship. He sailed to England on the SS United States and then to Paris, where he leased a car, a Citroën 2CV, to travel to Spain, Italy, and eventually back to Paris. He spent most of his time in Florence, where he learned to cast his first sculptures in bronze, at the renowned Marinelli foundry. His time abroad solidified his belief that metal was the definitive medium of the twentieth century.
Military service Hunt served in the United States Army from 1958 to 1960. He took basic training at Fort Leonard Wood. Hunt served as an illustrator for Brooke Army Medical Center.
Desegregation activism On March 7, 1960, Mary Andrews, president of the local youth council of the NAACP, wrote letters to store managers in downtown San Antonio, Texas, who operated white-only lunch counters. Encouraged by the growing sit-in movement, she requested equal services be provided to all, regardless of race. Hunt in U.S. Army uniform went to lunch at Woolworth's on March 16, 1960. Seated at the counter, his order was taken, and he was served without incident. Hunt, the only known African American to eat at San Antonio's Woolworth's lunch counter that day, fulfilled Mary Andrews's vision of integration. This action, along with a handful of other African Americans at other lunch counters across the city, made San Antonio the first peaceful and voluntary lunch counter integration in the south.
Teaching After completing his military service, Hunt was invited to teach a class in metal design by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago during the 1960–1961 academic year. He also taught sculpture, drawing, and metalworking at the University of Illinois branch at Navy pier for two years. In 1962, Hunt was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for Creative Sculpture, which enabled him to stop teaching and become a full-time sculptor.
Influences Hunt began to experiment with materials and sculpting techniques, influenced heavily by progressive twentieth-century artists. At the age of 17, Hunt was inspired to focus on sculpture after visiting the exhibition, Sculpture of the Twentieth Century, which was held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1953. The Sculpture of the Twentieth Century included works of Pablo Picasso, Julio González, David Smith, Constantin Brancusi, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Alberto Giacometti, Umberto Boccioni, and Jean Arp. At the exhibition, Hunt for the first time saw various artworks of welded metal. Hunt was also inspired and paid respect to French sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon whose 1914 bronze "Horse" was instructional. Seeing these artists' works led Hunt to teach himself how to solder wire to create small figures. He would later go on to create both figurative and abstract shapes by learning to weld metal in 1955. Hunt also focused on linear-spatial arrangement of his materials where he followed Julio González's footsteps into three-dimensional structures.
Career From 1955 through the 1970s, Hunt used scrap yards as his quarries and transformed salvaged metal into abstract, welded sculptures. Early works such as Hero’s Head (1956), Arachne (1956), Steel Bloom, Number 10 (1956), and Hero Construction (1958) set the foundation for Hunt's exploration of various sculptural forms; and his merging of anthropomorphic, biomorphic, and metamorphic elements into single works of art. These early sculptures were followed by a series of welded metal compositions with a calligraphic style that experimented with linear space. Following the influence of Julio González, Hunt's “drawing in space” sculptures pushed the limits of metals’ tensile strength to create delicate and expansive linear forms. In the early 1960s, Hunt began to explore enclosed forms with a focus on incorporating rounded, organic shapes and axial geometry.
Hunt's frequent experimentation garnered critically positive response from the art community, such that Hunt was exhibited at several of the Artists of Chicago and Vicinity Shows and the American Show, where the Museum of Modern Art purchased Arachne (1956) 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.
Hunt received his first sculpture commission from the State of Illinois Public Art Program in 1967. In 1969, he finished the commission, resulting in a public artwork named Play. This was the start of Hunt's use of Cor-Ten steel as a material, which was inspired by Picasso's use of the same material in his large work (The Picasso) in Daley Plaza, Chicago. Hunt's Play stands in the John J. Madden Health Center in Maywood, Illinois.
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 (12 m) ceiling. While handling the metal, Hunt worked with two assistants. Hunt described metalworks as "free play of forms evolving, developing and contrasting with one another."
Seeking a more direct connection with nature, Hunt bought a farmhouse on 26 acres in McHenry County, Illinois, in 1974, while continuing to maintain his Lill Avenue studio in Chicago. He also purchased a satellite studio in Benton Harbor, Michigan in 1995 as part of an initiative to revitalize the community. This Richard Hunt Studio Center was gifted to the Krasl Art Center in August 2023.
In 1981, Hunt was chosen to serve as one of eight jurors—both the youngest and the sole African American—for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial design competition. On March 30, 1,421 designs were submitted and displayed for the jury in an airport hangar at Andrews Air Force Base. Ultimately, the jury, including Hunt, selected a design by Maya Lin.
Hunt was the first African American visual artist to serve on the National Council on the Arts, the governing body of the National Endowment for the Arts. He was appointed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1968. He also served on boards of the Smithsonian Institution. From 1980 to 1988, Hunt served as Commissioner of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American Art. From 1994 to 1997, Hunt served on the Smithsonian Institution's National Board of Directors.
In 2023, Hunt established the Richard Hunt Legacy Foundation as a nonprofit arts organization. The foundation is operated by a board of trustees that includes Hunt's close friends, collectors, family members, art professionals, and scholars, including his official biographer, Jon Ott. The foundation has partnered with the Chicago Sculpture Exhibit to offer the bi-annual Richard Hunt Award–a monetary prize given to an emerging or mid-career sculptor to create a work sited in Chicago for two years. The foundation has collaborated closely with the Public Art Archive to document Hunt's extensive public works. Another long-term initiative is compiling a catalogue raisonné of all Hunt's works of art.
Notable works of art
Early period (1953–1975)