Remembering Richard Hunt (1935–2023)

I never met Richard Hunt, to my great regret, but I am charmed by the practicality that comes through in many of his published statements. Take, for example, his response to art historian Adrienne L. Childs in the luxurious monograph on his work that was published just last year.¹ Childs asked Hunt if he was aware of his contribution to what a former generation of curators had called “a renaissance for sculpture in the 1950s.” “No,” Hunt replied. “You just do what you do. I mean, it’s not like you can go into the studio and say, ‘Okay, this is my place in history. I am going to make this, and this is going to be a part of something.’ You are just trying to get things done.”

Hunt really got a lot done over the course of his 70-plus-year career. His first three decades in particular were intertwined with The Museum of Modern Art. His turn to metal as a sculptural material was inspired by seeing an exhibition co-organized by MoMA at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1953. Two years later, while still a student welding his work in his parents’ basement, he sold a sculpture to William Lieberman, MoMA’s curator of Prints. (That year, Lieberman was also responsible for bringing early work by Barbara Chase-Riboud into the Museum’s collection.) Dorothy Miller, the legendary MoMA curator whose Americans series of exhibitions helped define a history of American art, saw Hunt’s sculpture Arachne in a 1957 exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago (she served as a juror for the show). It was acquired and on view at MoMA mere months later.

Two views of Richard Hunt’s sculpture Arachne (1956)

Jump ahead to 1971, when the Museum presented the midcareer survey The Sculpture of Richard Hunt. The artist was 35; the exhibition press release references his “astonishingly short career.” When Childs asked him how he felt about being the subject of a solo exhibition at MoMA, Hunt responded, “Well, I mean, things happen the way they happen. It was certainly an opportunity that I was pleased to be accorded.”²

Of course, Hunt earned all of this early acclaim by making great art. For Arachne, he transformed a car muffler, two lampshades, and various other metal odds and ends into a haunting figure: part insect, part human, and part machine. Elsewhere in New York, at the corner of 125th Street and Morningside Avenue, you can see his monumental public sculpture Harlem Hybrid and marvel at how its massive geometric forms seem to spring from the city’s bedrock into the tiny patch of nature it occupies, a small triangle of green set between major urban thoroughfares.

The Sculpture of Richard Hunt, The Museum of Modern Art, March 25–June 9, 1971

Amid his early published texts you can find Hunt discussing both his process and his approach to his work, but always holding his accomplishments at arm’s length. “Art does not succeed in time by being more personal, different, or even original than any other,” he wrote in the 1967 text included in his 1971 exhibition catalogue. “It succeeds by remaining intact, and, while it may not look so different from other art of the period, or whatever else constitutes its environment, containing within its form ideas and associations, which can continue to stimulate people who view it.” Hunt was 35 and had a major exhibition at MoMA, but he refused to take a victory lap. Rather, he was looking simultaneously back and forward, situating his work in a centuries-long dialogue about sculpture, and hoping it would live on to touch people for centuries to come. Perhaps this was how he managed “to keep one’s head in the clouds but one’s feet on the ground,” as he wrote in the same text.

From left, Romare Bearden, John B. Hightower (background center), and Richard Hunt at the opening of the exhibitions Romare Bearden: The Prevalance of Ritual and The Sculpture of Richard Hunt (both March 25–June 9, 1971)

In 1957, responding to this Museum’s standard artist query—“What in your ancestry, nationality, or background do you consider relevant to an understanding of your art?”—Hunt answered simply, “Nothing, or maybe everything?” What a perfect answer for the artist who, in 1971, became only the second Black sculptor to have a solo show at MoMA. (The first was the self-taught stone carver William Edmondson, whose exhibition took place in 1937.) I cannot imagine the pressures he must have felt, and the kind of personal strength it must have taken to keep on making work in the face of criticism that his abstract sculpture was not what was needed from him at that moment in history.

In hindsight, it seems to me that it was exactly what was needed. Hunt’s Blackness, and its intersection with his art, was somehow both nothing and everything. If, as a younger man, he distanced himself from narrow definitions of what a Black artist was “supposed” to make, this did not stop him from celebrating Black culture and accomplishments in his work, and from making major public monuments to historical luminaries. The most recent, unveiled in Chicago in 2021, memorializes the journalist and activist Ida B. Wells. “I am a Chicago artist because I am from this city; I’m a Black artist because I happen to be Black,” Hunt said recently.³ “These descriptions are sometimes useful to other people. But I’m also many other things—a man, a human being, an artist.” MoMA’s early recognition of this artist, who went on to be the best version of all of these things, is something to be immensely proud of. It is an honor to have him represented in the collection so that his work may “continue to stimulate people who view it.” I count myself among them.

Richard Hunt. The Light of Truth Ida B. Wells National Monument. 2021. Image by Historyfar