Sculptors From The United States

"I try to understand the "why" of a project before it's a "what." And this might be more pertinent to some of my memorial projects. Memorials are a hybrid between art and architecture because they have a function."

"Another adage in art is: you're a child and then you become an adult. You're always trying to regain that pure, almost empathetic response that you have when you're a child. It doesn't come with a lot of baggage. You're not worried about, "Oh, what are you thinking here, here, here?" You just respond in certain ways. I think sometimes: Can you think like a child? We're always trying to regain that. I almost make things imagining a child will experience them."

"Every bowl we ate off was something he made by hand: stonewares connected to nature and natural colors and materials. And so I think our everyday lives was imbued with this very clean, modern, but very warm aesthetic, and that very much influenced me."

"In art, I get to walk into my head and do whatever I want to do, to free up completely. That goes back to my roots in Athens, Ohio, my roots in nature and my feelings of connections to the environment, that everything is coalesced around being inspired by the natural world and reflecting that beauty out to others."

"I value writing. I respect it. I find it the most difficult thing for me to do, but when I'm done I am unbelievably just at peace. If you think about art as being able to share your thoughts with another, writing is totally pure."

"I've been a huge admirer of your work for a long time, and Michelle has as well."

"Richard Hunt’s art is American treasure to be discovered, rediscovered, reflected upon, and protected."

"One of the most illustrious graduates of the School of the Art Institute, Richard Hunt is a Chicago Legend and one of the most important sculptors of our time"

"Richard Hunt is one of the most admired sculptors of his generation."

"Richard Hunt is one of the most important artists of our time."

"One of the most innovative artists of the twentieth century."

"The history of Black people in the United States of America, no one needs to be reminded, has been constantly marked by rejection and rupture. Thus, in his art, from the outset, Hunt has focused on alternative possibilities, such as redemption and freeing ourselves from the manacles of history. It is time that we honor his vision."

"Sometimes it is not about making art. Sometimes it is about making statements about culture and history or history and culture with or through art."

"Our most prominent Black sculptor. His metal pieces are exquisitely torqued and fissured, organic forms that meld industrial materials with high concepts . . . now in his late 80s, he remains a vibrant presence."

"Richard is the real deal a true independent spirit deeply rooted in his home turf, yet, like a kind of vulcan at his forge, sending forth metal incarnations of human striving and transcendence sending them like the mighty abstract sparks far and wide."

"The artist’s approach to sculpture, and to metal as a material, is an ongoing expression and articulation of a life lived in and as sculpture."

"If we count [Richard Hunt] among the Americans who simultaneously motivated a critique of the machine age and uncovered nuance within it by way of sculpture (Alexander Calder, Isamu Noguchi, Beverly Pepper, and either Smith, David or Tony), or those for whom the means of manufacture were experimental, often nostalgic and fetishized in equal parts (Anthony Caro, John Chamberlain, Mark di Suvero, Melvin Edwards, Hesse, and Judd), he stands out."

"Hunt’s work represents an almost mythic continuum that assembles themes of ancestry, modernity, nation, and memory: a man, his legacy, and myth having very real places in the world as one."

"I am a Chicago artist because I am from this city; I’m a Black artist because I happen to be Black. These descriptions are sometimes useful to other people. But I’m also many other things—a man, a human being, an artist. Artists have a unique opportunity to make a difference . . . to look and work toward the future. Most people, by the nature of their work, have to think about what’s happening now, to serve as kind of custodians of our culture; but artists have the opportunity and responsibility to be forward-looking. We have the job of creating new ideas and visions for the future, and I’m pleased to be a part of that."

"I am interested more than anything else in being a free person. To me, that means that I can make what I want to make, regardless of what anyone else thinks I should make. My art is about art—embracing a vision of the future that is unlike past futures."

"Richard Hunt is a kind of superhero of sculpture, one of the hardest working artists of all time, clearly a master metal worker still crushing it in his 80s."

"Sculpture is not a self-declaration but a voice of and for my people—over all, a rich fabric; under all, the dynamism of the African American people."

"A pivotal figure in 20th century sculpture."

"I have such profound respect for you and your insistence on working with such dedication and perseverance."

"I first saw a story about Richard in one of those picture magazines when I was a younger teenager. It was the first time I'd ever seen a Black artist featured in any of those publications and I never forgot it. He's been someone I've looked up to ever since."

"For me to be able to work in Richard's studio and see the master work was such a special moment that helped set a foundation for my life and success."

"His sculpture has been hailed as the work of a master."

"The sheer hard work and intelligence of his artistic practice will resonate as one of the archetypal legacies of American sculpture."

"Totemic American Sculptor of the 20th Century."

"Imagining a world without racial hierarchy, I work as if race did not exist. Look the world over, learn, enjoy, luxuriate, dream large, expansive dreams of a glorious future for ourselves and all mankind. Then, we turn our attention to what is humanly possible."

"Richard Hunt is a national treasure. Richard is someone who cares so much for his fellow man that his life’s work of sculpture is about helping human beings to appreciate each other."

"Sculpture is all about hard work and delayed gratification, and mysterious, harmonious, pleasantly jarring, revelatory spatial structures—having good times and bad times at the same time."

"I am the thinking person’s sculptor, joining metal manipulation to meaningful expression."

"We have a young man here, Richard Hunt, who I think is a great sculptor. This man is an artist. It has nothing to do with race; it is that real spark, unfathomable, and unidentifiable, that is deeply felt. The power of his sculpture is unassailable."

"He is simply a superhero among American artist. Sculpt-activists. There I just spontaneously invented a new word trying to explain this man's meaning to me, mic drop."

"He was an inspiration to me, he was a mentor, and in my eyes he was a warrior who smashed the barriers that kept artists of color from moving toward their goals."

"I like working with my hands, making things and holding things. As a sculptor, I talk about using your head, your heart, and your hands— you think about things, you feel things, and then you use your hands to try to represent what that is, in some material."

"The possibilities of developing the sense of movement in a sculpture are inherent in the material and in the technique, that is to say, forming, bending, stretching, cutting, and twisting metal parts. I like to suggest movement or give an impression of movement."

"Trees have long been my metaphor, symbolic of my inner and outer growth—the taproot delving deep into my conscious and subconscious, the origins of my art, life, and family; peripheral roots branching out into other communities, cultures, a cosmos of interweaving inter- actions; a trunk and branches reaching up and out beyond their tips, leaves, fruit, falling here and there."

"What a rare, rare, sweet yet fierce man, lifted as he climbed, a gift to generations, a dear soul, Richard Hunt."

"I must, I can, I will provide the physical evidence of my and my family’s having lived upon this Earth, this planet. 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."

"To be creative is to not know what one is doing. The process of creation resolves the imbalance or irritation that initiated the desire to create something. Sculpture is a way of exploring, amplifying, and giving form to my enthusiasms, which are wide-ranging and often intersect each other, technically, emotionally, and spiritually."

"The goal is to wander, wander through the unknown in search of the unknown, all the while leaving your mark. Art can do it all: a life of doing things, a life of making things."

"I came to see the strength of my own roots and past. The success of the early phase of the civil rights movement, which resulted in voting rights legislation and the breaking down of obvious barriers like segregated drinking fountains and public accommodations, gave one a sense of being able to prevail. What happened after that was chastening, tempering. Another thing, too, is to discover the obvious—that the foundations of American society were built upon the backs of our forefathers."

"My own use of winged forms in the early ’50s is based on mythological themes, like Icarus and Winged Victory. It’s about, on the one hand, trying to achieve victory or freedom internally. It’s also about investigating ideas of personal and collective freedom. My use of these forms has roots and resonances in the African-American experience and is also a universal symbol. People have always seen birds flying and wished they could fly."

"Whether creating organic forms that rise from columnar bases or stacking airy clusters of winglike shapes, Hunt is speaking to the ideals of transformation and aspiration."

"It is often felt that the lyric or romantic sensibility cannot express itself in iron. The intent of a good deal of my work is to demonstrate that it is a possibility no more foreign to iron than to marble."

"I have always been interested in the concept of freedom on the personal and universal levels: political freedom, freedom to think and to feel. As an African American living in the United States, obviously issues like segregation laws, the civil rights movement in the 1960s or South Africa have been on my mind when I have dealt with the concept of freedom. But freedom also relates to my career as an artist: freedom of mind, thought and imagination. On the artistic level, freedom was a significant principle in the earlier art movements, such as Surrealism or Abstract Expressionism. More recently, public art focuses on the issue of universal freedom."

"Can the wisdom of the ages serve as the wisdom of the new age, the new millennium? Conventional wisdom is often not subject to or confirmed by independent research. The triumphal road for some can be a Trail of Tears for others."

"One of the central themes in my work is the reconciliation of the organic and the industrial. I see my work as forming a kind of bridge between what we experience in nature and what we experience from the urban, industrial, technology-driven society we live in. I like to think that within the work that I approach most successfully there is a resolution of the tension between the sense of freedom one has in contemplating nature and the sometimes restrictive, closed feeling engendered by the rigors of the city, the rigors of the industrial environment."