Super Sculptor
Happy birthday to sculptor and printmaker Richard Hunt!For more than three decades Richard Hunt's status as the foremost African American abstract sculptor and artist of public sculpture has remained unchallenged. Executed in welded and cast steel, aluminum, copper, and bronze, Hunt's abstract creations make frequent references to plant, human, and animal forms. Hunt prefers to be called a "Midwestern sculptor," and is one of the few well known African American sculptors who still resides and works in his hometown.
Inspired by a passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance, this sculpture demonstrates Hunt's attempt to harmonize dualities: "the organic and the geometric, the organic and the abstract, or the past and the present, the traditional and the contemporary."
Source: Regenia A. Perry. Free within Ourselves: African-American Artists in the Collection of the National Museum of American Art (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art in Association with Pomegranate Art Books, 1992). Also Free within Ourselves (exhibition text, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1992).
Pictured: Richard Hunt, born 1935, "The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the truest heroism, is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed."—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance, 1852. From the series "Great Ideas", 1975, chromed and welded steel, 32 x 50 5/8 x 33 3/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Container Corporation of America.
Happy birthday to sculptor and printmaker Richard Hunt!For more than three decades Richard Hunt's status as the foremost African American abstract sculptor and artist of public sculpture has remained unchallenged. Executed in welded and cast steel, aluminum, copper, and bronze, Hunt's abstract creations make frequent references to plant, human, and animal forms. Hunt prefers to be called a "Midwestern sculptor," and is one of the few well known African American sculptors who still resides and works in his hometown.