Richard Hunt, an artist who found national acclaim with his abstract metal sculptures — assembled from chrome fenders, gnarled bumpers, twisted pipes and other junkyard staples — and who went on to reach a wider audience with his soaring public art commissions, monumental works that often evoked African American history and culture, died Dec. 16 at his home in Chicago. He was 88.
His death was announced in a statement on his website, which did not cite a cause.
In a career that spanned nearly seven decades, Mr. Hunt brought a buoyant lyricism to the heaviest of materials, creating works of steel, bronze, copper and iron that rose skyward like trees or fire or spread outward like wings. His sculptures included public pieces such as the 35-foot-tall “Flight Forms” (2002), which greets visitors to Chicago’s Midway International Airport, and “Swing Low” (2016), a birdlike 1,500-pound bronze work suspended in the lobby of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
“The whole idea of imparting movement into metal is core to Richard’s aesthetic,” his biographer Jon Ott said in a phone interview. Mr. Hunt’s work was filled with images of flight and ascension, he added, driven in part by the artist’s abiding concern for freedom. “That’s freedom from segregation, freedom from slavery,” Ott said. “But it’s also about artistic freedom — the freedom to create what he wants to create.”
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Mr. Hunt’s early career paralleled the rise of the modern civil rights movement. During the summer of 1955, as a 19-year-old art student, he taught himself to weld — setting up a metal shop in his parents’ basement on the South Side of Chicago — and went to the open-casket funeral of Emmett Till, the Black teenager whose murder helped expose the world to the horrors of American racism in general and the Jim Crow-era South in particular.
Abducted, tortured and shot in the head after allegedly whistling at a White woman in a Mississippi grocery store, Till came from Woodlawn, the same Chicago neighborhood as Mr. Hunt, and grew up two blocks from the home where Mr. Hunt was born. “What happened to [Till] could have happened to me,” Mr. Hunt said.
Months after Till’s funeral, he completed one of his first welded steel sculptures, the modest but searing “Hero’s Head” (1956), a memorial to the slain teenager. He later produced sculptures of prominent Black Americans including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Mary McLeod Bethune, Jesse Owens, Hobart Taylor Jr. and Ida B. Wells, in addition to making pieces that commemorated the Middle Passage and the Great Migration.
“Sculpture is not a self-declaration,” he once said, “but a voice of and for my people — over all, a rich fabric; under all, the dynamism of the African American people.”
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Politics and history were only one branch of inspiration for Mr. Hunt, who also drew from nature, mythology and the varied sounds of classical music (for his more deliberate monumental works) and jazz (for his studio pieces, which were more improvisational). He made lithographs, drawings and soldered wire figures, and early in his career he was known for fantastical metal sculptures such as “Arachne” (1956), which was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York when he was just 21, and “Hero Construction” (1958), a fusion of discarded auto parts now on view at the Art Institute of Chicago.
In 1971, the MoMA organized his first major retrospective, bringing together 50 of his sculptures along with drawings and prints. It was the first time the museum had mounted a retrospective for an African American sculptor, according to Ott. Mr. Hunt was only 35.
“There are really very few American sculptors of Mr. Hunt’s generation who have produced a comparable body of work so early in their development,” wrote New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer, calling Mr. Hunt “an artist who remains totally independent of both current fashions and of his own past successes.”
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Presidents also took note. Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Mr. Hunt to the National Council on the Arts in 1968, and Bill Clinton brought his plow-like piece “Farmer’s Dream” to the White House grounds in 1994 for a showcase on modern sculpture. Barack Obama, who praised Mr. Hunt in a statement as “one of the finest artists ever to come out of Chicago,” commissioned him in 2022 to create a piece for a public library at the Obama Presidential Center, which is scheduled to open in Chicago in 2025.
Share this articleShareThe library sculpture was one of Mr. Hunt’s last completed works, along with a sculptural model for a monument to Till that brought his career full circle. The monument, a work of welded bronze called “Hero Ascending,” is to be completed by his studio crew and placed outside Till’s childhood home.
The older of two children, Richard Howard Hunt was born in Chicago on Sept. 12, 1935. His father was a barber, his mother a librarian. They steered him toward music, enrolling Mr. Hunt in violin classes as a boy, but he took to the visual arts instead.
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Mr. Hunt was influenced by an aunt who made watercolors, including a picture of two dogs that he kept in his studio for decades, and by shows he saw at the Art Institute of Chicago, including a 1953 exhibition that featured works by Alberto Giacometti and Julio González, igniting his interest in metal sculpture.
At 13, he began taking junior classes at the museum’s art school. He received a bachelor’s degree from the school in 1957 and spent a year in Europe, studying art and working at a bronze foundry in Florence, before being drafted into the Army in 1958.
Shortly before his discharge in 1960, he participated in a planned sit-in at a Woolworth’s in San Antonio, where he was stationed. Pressure from the local NAACP chapter led to what is often described as the first peaceful and voluntary lunch-counter integration campaign in the South, with Mr. Hunt sitting down for lunch in his uniform without protest.
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Mr. Hunt returned to Chicago, where he worked since the early 1970s out of a former electrical substation in the Lincoln Park neighborhood, often sleeping on a mattress on the floor with his tools and sculptures spread out around him. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1962, served as an artist-in-residence at schools including Harvard and Yale, and began what he called his “second career” as a public sculptor with “Play” (1967), a commissioned steel sculpture in the Chicago suburbs. More than 160 of his sculptures now adorn cities in two dozen states.
His first marriage, to college classmate Bettye Scott in 1957, ended in divorce. He was later married for six years to Lenora Cartright, a former Chicago commissioner of human services, until her death in 1989. His third marriage, to Dutch art and antiquities dealer Anuschka Menist, ended in divorce.
Survivors include a daughter from his first marriage, Cecilia Hunt; and a sister.
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Mr. Hunt sometimes spoke about his work in cosmic terms, describing each piece as “a step toward an ever more perfect union of space, time, and motion.” Yet it also had a deeply personal significance.
“I must, I can, I will provide the physical evidence of my and my family’s having lived upon this Earth, this planet,” he wrote in an essay published on his website in 2021. “In the great scheme of things, it is less than a drop in the bucket, but it pleases me to be able to leave this evidence here for a time.”
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