Freedom in Form: Richard Hunt

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“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, artist's statement, 2021

Richard Hunt (1935-2023) was a paragon artist of the 20th century. He was recognized as a singular talent as a young artist, was well-regarded by his contemporaries, and became unparalleled in public art commissions across the United States. Freedom in Form: Richard Hunt at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum presents Hunt’s artistic achievement within the national narrative of the struggle for freedom and the halting delivery of liberty to all people. A history and heritage that motivated Hunt’s 70 years of making art in America.

Hunt was born on Chicago’s South Side and made the city his artistic home, a perch from which he interpreted histories and myths with the materials that built the modern urban metropolis: steel, bronze, and aluminum. Hunt's career spanned the length of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements and into today’s demands for justice. But his attention never turned away from the abstract folds, twists, and soaring shapes that best articulated a purity of artistic expression, a form of freedom he championed and pursued.  

Ross Stanton Jordan, Curator

Beautiful and Terrible Things

Beautiful and Terrible Things

After emancipation and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, violence against Black communities maintained the racial hierarchy. Between 1877 and 1950, more than 4,700 racial lynchings occurred in the United States. Lynchings were public events tolerated and frequently aided by law enforcement and directed at Black individuals for any infraction. Black journalists, activists, politicians, and community leaders tracked extra-judicial murders, but demands for recognition of those killed and justice for perpetrators were often ignored. This racialized violence served as a catalyst for an estimated six million Black people to move out of the Southern United States to urban centers in the Northeast, West, and Midwest. They took their skill, labor, education, and ambitions with them. The Great Migration remains one of the most significant sustained mobilizations of internal migration in response to violence. Today, few public monuments commemorate the victims of lynchings, and many states ignore the history.

(continued)

Beautiful and Terrible Things

Richard Hunt completed Hero’s Head (1956) less than a year after the killing of fourteen-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till, who was accused of flirting with a white woman while visiting family in Money, Mississippi. The Hunt family lived a few blocks from Till’s home and shared a similar lineage. Both families were part of a generation of migrants who fled racial terror in the South and made their way to Chicago as a part of the Great Migration. Both families sent their children back South to visit relatives left behind, in Hunt’s case, visits with relatives in Georgia. The Hunt family was among the thousands of mourners who attended Till’s open casket funeral at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ on Chicago’s South Side on September 6, 1955. Photojournalist Simeon Booker’s image of Till’s mutilated head circulated widely in the Black press. The murder outraged Black communities, and the image galvanized a new generation of civil rights movement leaders. Already an ambitious artist at nineteen, Hunt kept a studio in the basement of his father’s barbershop, where he taught himself to weld—training that was not available at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was enrolled. In his basement studio, Hunt created his first welded sculpture in response to American racial terror.

Beautiful and Terrible Things

Hero’s Head

1956

Welded steel

Hunt completed Hero’s Head in the basement of his father’s barbershop, less than a year after the killing of Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi. Welded from scrap metal, Hero’s Head is an unflinching portrait of American racism, a memorialization of Hunt’s childhood neighbor, and a monument to a victim of anti-Black violence.

Collection of The Richard Hunt Trust

Beautiful and Terrible Things

Portrait of Richard Hunt

Nelli Bar, American, (1904–2001)

1977

Cast bronze

Nelli Bar was Hunt’s teacher at the Junior
School of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She created this bust after Hunt was already a well-established artist. The portrait represents years of mutual respect, mentorship, and friendship.

Collection of The Richard Hunt Trust

Beautiful and Terrible Things

Steel Bloom, Number 1

1956

Welded steel

Hunt’s resourcefulness is on full display in the Steel Bloom series. Metal was expensive, so Hunt sourced much of the metal in these sculptures from Chicago alleys and scrapyards. Rather than using fabricated flat sheets of metal, these scraps provided Hunt with material that was inherently sculptural. Industrial fabrication methods, such as threaded rods and machine-drilled holes, are visible in these works. Hunt transformed urban materials into flighty, insect- and plant-like creations.

DePaul Art Museum, DePaul University, Chicago

Beautiful and Terrible Things

Steel Bloom, Number 3

1956

Welded steel

DePaul Art Museum, DePaul University, Chicago

Lill Avenue Studio

Lill Avenue Studio

The visibility of racialized violence and openly enforced segregation in the South allowed whites in Northern urban centers, like Chicago, to distance themselves from the most vile outcomes of white supremacy. Civil rights leaders in 1965 wanted to change that narrative. Northern cities forced Black residents into cramped, dilapidated, rat-infested housing that city officials could neglect and ignore. The “End Slums” campaign, led by the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations, brought Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to Chicago. A march in 1966 on a real estate office to demand an end to housing discrimination was met with white mob violence. King commented that he had never seen “mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I’m seeing in Chicago.” The effect of housing discrimination in Chicago was that Black renters and owners faced violence when trying to claim space for themselves and rarely owned any of the spaces in which they lived, worked, gathered, and entertained.

Lill Avenue Studio

In 1971, Hunt purchased a defunct power substation building in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood as his new studio. The forty-five-foot ceiling and skylights illuminated the space and allowed for the fabrication of larger sculptures. The space also included a small loft where Hunt slept for much of the next fifty years. Hunt’s Lill Avenue studio became the hub for his artistic practice and a space to invite fellow artists, musicians, and performers for happenings and concerts. The founding of the Lill Avenue studio was a significant accomplishment in a city where racial segregation was enforced through the control of space.

Lill Avenue Studio

Hunt’s Tools and Workbench

Steel workbench from Hunt’s studio, with a selection of his tools, including metal benders, grinders, pliers, hammers, Hunt’s face shield, and a stainless steel sculptural fragment that Hunt created.

Hunt designed and crafted some of his own tools so he and his studio assistants could produce unique shapes from large slabs of bronze, steel, and aluminum. Commercially produced tools displayed here are made using a drop-forged method that creates highly durable steel. But after years of heavy use, the tools themselves take on unique shapes, adding special character to the metal they pound into art.

The studio workbench displayed in this exhibition was designed and created by blacksmith Christopher Leslie of Chicago for Richard Hunt.

Collection of The Richard Hunt Trust

Photography by Nathan Keays

Lill Avenue Studio

Three of Hunt’s most favored and often used tools

Ball pein hammer given to Hunt by his father in 1955 when Hunt taught himself direct-metal technique
Straight pein hammer famously pictured with Hunt in the 1971 MoMA retrospective catalogue
Cross pein hammer named “Behemouth” due to its heft

Lill Avenue Studio

Lill Avenue Studio

Lill Avenue Studio

Untitled

ca. 1980

Welded chromed steel

DePaul Art Museum, DePaul University, Chicago

Lill Avenue Studio

Bridging and Branching

1986

Flute and double bass
Duration: 8.5 minutes

Commission: Richard Hunt in celebration of his 50th birthday, for Joseph Guastafeste. 1st performance: Chicago, IL. Studio of Richard Hunt. May, 1986. Lynn Leifer, flute; Joseph Guastafeste, double bass.

In 1986, Hunt commissioned a music score from his friend and renowned composer Thomas Jefferson “T.J.” Anderson. Inspired by Hunt’s work, particularly a maquette for a public sculpture titled Bridging and Branching (1981), Anderson composed a piece for flute and double bass of the same name. From the 1970s into the 1990s, Hunt invited Anderson and other musicians to perform in his studio, sometimes accompanied by dancers. In the photo above, bottom right, T.J. Anderson conducts a rehearsal for a performance at Hunt’s Lill Avenue studio in 1978.

Publisher: Germany, Bote and Bock, 1987

Black Representation

Black Representation

Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968 brought outraged Black Americans to the streets. The uprisings engulfed urban centers across the country for weeks. Black activists and artists transformed this frustration and anger into new efforts to rebuild their communities. They created new community art spaces and formed new pressure and advocacy groups. The Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC), among other groups, was formed in New York City in early 1969 to pressure the city’s art institutions to establish greater representation for Black artists and curators. These groups wrote open letters, picketed outside museums, and used creative protest actions to draw attention to the lack of Black representation at all levels of arts and culture institutions. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), founded in 1929, was the target of significant scrutiny because of its deficits in the representation of Black artists and lack of inclusion of Black curators.

Black Representation

AWC’s campaign led, in part, to Hunt’s retrospective at MoMA in 1971. At thirty-five, Hunt was the first Black sculptor to receive a solo exhibition in the museum’s forty-two-year history. Hunt’s 1971 retrospective at MoMA catapulted the already well-regarded Hunt into the debate about the role of Black artists in the fight for equity. For some Black activists, Hunt’s sculptures— concerned with hybrid organic and metal forms with few explicit references to Black identity—were an insufficient incursion in the white-dominated museum space. Hunt’s commitment to equality included a commitment to his own artistic vision, which drew on a wide variety of references. Hunt’s MoMA exhibition and the pressure campaign that made the exhibition possible were part of a long-standing effort to correct Black representation in the country’s cultural institutions.

Black Representation

John Jones

Richard Hunt was only thirty-two when the State of Illinois Sesquicentennial Committee commissioned him to create a sculpture celebrating John Jones (1816–1879), Illinois’ first Black elected official. The style is uncharacteristic of Hunt’s body of work, but Hunt took the commission as a challenge. The artist shows Jones burdened with racial injustice, dragging his foot and weighing down his shoulders. “I made him look as if he is climbing, burdened with weights that are part of him.” Hunt said of this sculpture in a profile in Ebony magazine in April 1969, “They show his struggle.”

John Jones was a self-educated businessman and racial justice advocate. He was born free in North Carolina at a time when the state held 140,000 Black people in bondage. His parents sent him to Memphis, where an apprenticeship could fend off claims on his freedom. There, Jones met his wife, Mary Jane Richardson Jones (1819–1910). In 1845, they moved to Chicago, where the family spent the next two decades demanding the end of the Illinois Black Codes.

Black Representation

(John Jones, continued)

Black Codes barred Black citizens from voting, testifying against whites, receiving public education, entering public accommodation, and public transportation. Free Blacks had to register with the county clerk or risk losing their freedom. Despite the danger, John and Mary used their Chicago home on West 9th St. and Plymouth Ct. as a stop on the Underground Railroad. They led hundreds of formerly enslaved people to freedom. John Jones convinced the Illinois legislature to repeal the Black Codes in 1865. Five years later, Jones became Illinois’ first Black elected official, a Cook County Commissioner. Mary lent her considerable stature to support women-led organizations. Her efforts laid the foundation for the next generation of Black female leadership in Chicago, including journalist and anti-lynching advocate Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931) and organizer and activist Fannie Barrier William (1855–1944).

Photograph The Richard Hunt Estate

Black Representation

John Jones

1968–69
Welded aluminum
Steps recreated under the direction of the artist’s estate in 2024

The DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center, Chicago

Black Representation

Winged Fragment

1963

Welded chromed steel

Chromed steel bumpers were a perennial source of sculptural material for Hunt who procured them from junkyards throughout Chicago the first few decades of his career. The mirror-like finish of chrome counterbalanced the weightiness of Hunt’s heavy metal sculpture. The steel sculpted into wing-like shapes added to the levity and visceral sense of ascension, which is a hallmark of Hunt’s work.

Private Collection

Black Representation

Hybrid Muse

1985

Cast bronze

Hunt was inspired by extraordinary sculptures throughout history and across the world. Two thousand years ago, Greek culture represented victory in the form of a winged goddess, Winged Victory of Samothrace (190 BC). Hunt updated this iconic form with cast bronze, showing his interest in a continued dialog with ancient sculptural forms and icons. The sculpture was commissioned by the Illinois Arts Council Foundation to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the state arts funding agency and the National Endowment for the Arts, both founded in 1965.

DePaul Art Museum, DePaul University, Chicago

Black Representation

Hybrid Form, Number 3, or Crescent Hybrid

1970

Cast bronze

Hybrid Form, Number 3, or Crescent Hybrid is part of an editioned series exhibited in Hunt’s 1971 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the first for a Black sculptor in the museum’s forty-two-year history. The transformation of hard edges into organic forms reveals Hunt’s interest in metals’ ability to move between the two states, a theme throughout his career. Hunt’s close observation of animals while working at the Zoological Experimental Laboratory at the University of Chicago between 1951 and 1957 inspired these forms and others like it.

Private Collection

Black Representation

Hybrid Figure

1977

Welded steel

Illinois State Museum, Springfield

Photography by the Illinois State Museum

Black Representation

Glider

1966

Welded aluminum

Collection of The Richard Hunt Trust

Black Representation

Large Hybrid

1971

Cast bronze (ed. 3/4)

The DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center, Chicago

Black Representation

Eagle Hybrid

1979

Welded bronze

Private Collection

Black Representation

Arching

1985

Welded bronze

The central gesture of Arching, a welded bronze sculpture with a near horizontal arch, recalls the separation of the earth from the heavens. Arching, for Hunt, evokes the reference to the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament: “And God said, Let there be a solid arch stretching over the waters…And God gave the arch the name of Heaven.” Hunt posed with Arching for the oil painting, Portrait of Richard Hunt (1985), by Simmie Knox.

Private Collection

Black Representation

Fish Curve Hybrid

1971

Cast bronze

Private Collection

Black Representation

"I have always been interested in the concept of freedom on the personal and universal levels: political freedom, freedom to think and feel. But freedom also relates to my career as an artist: freedom of mind, thought, and imagination"

- Richard Hunt

Monumental

Monumental

In January of 1960, the graduating class of Southern University, Baton Rouge, a historically Black land-grant university, commissioned Hunt to create a public work for the campus. This was Hunt’s first public commission and signaled the beginning of a public art career. Marvin Robinson, student body president, hosted Hunt and his wife, Bettye, during a visit to campus to review the location selected for the sculpture. Two months later, inspired by sit-ins at a Greensboro, North Carolina, Woolworth’s lunch counter, students at Southern University staged sit-ins at local businesses and a Greyhound bus station. Over two days, seventeen students were arrested, held on excessive bonds, and eventually expelled. An estimated 3,500 students marched on the state’s capital in response to the arrests.

Hunt was serving in the military in San Antonio when seventeen-year-old Mary Lillian Andrews, president of the local youth council of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), wrote letters to downtown business owners demanding the integration of lunch counters or face protest actions. After a rally held by the NAACP, which Hunt and his wife attended, downtown businesses agreed to integrate their counters on March 16, 1960, a day before demonstrations were set to begin. The businesses insisted that Andrews bring a light-colored friend with her. Other Black patrons faced verbal harassment.

Monumental

With an invitation from San Antonio architect Allison Peery and his wife Mimi, Hunt entered the San Antonio Woolworth’s lunch counter and was served with his friends without incident. San Antonio was the first Southern city to integrate its lunch counters voluntarily. Boundary-breaking baseball star Jackie Robinson called the San Antonio effort an example for the nation.

In May, Hunt’s Spirit Ascending was unveiled at Southern University’s Commencement. Marvin Robinson, in jail and expelled from campus, could not attend his own graduation or the unveiling. In December 1961, the US Supreme Court overturned the convictions of sit-in protestors, adding energy to the sit-in movement. Spirit Ascending was destroyed during a protest the following school year. Today, Hunt has over 160 public artworks installed nationwide, more than any other American sculptor.

Monumental

Public Works

Hunt made the largest contribution to public art in the United States, with more than 160 public sculpture commissions in twenty-four states and Washington, DC. Most of the public sculptures are in Illinois. To make large public sculptures, Hunt first produced maquettes, small-scale drafts of a design. Maquettes helped Hunt think through the design, build public support, and some are sold to collectors to fund large public installations.

Monumental

Maquette for Swing Low, Version Number 3

2016
Welded bronze

Swing Low welcomes visitors to the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The sculpture is titled after a beloved Christian hymn, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” that emerged from African American oral and musical traditions. Hunt has reflected the spiritual in material form, a flying chariot flanked by angels moving out in all directions

Collection of The Richard Hunt Trust

Monumental

Maquette for The Light of Truth Ida B. Wells National Monument

2020
Welded bronze

Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931) was born into slavery in Mississippi and became a prominent anti-lynching and Black suffrage advocate of her time. She moved to Chicago after white business owners firebombed the Memphis newspaper she co-owned. Wells- Barnett’s descendants selected Hunt after a decades-long campaign to erect the first monument to Ida B. Wells-Barnett, located in Bronzeville, Chicago.

Collection of The Richard Hunt Trust

Monumental

Maquette for Caryatid

1971

Cast bronze

Hunt’s interpretation of the Greek Caryatid is of a figure carrying a weight that cannot be removed. Hunt often connected the plight of those enslaved in the United States to narratives and symbols of bondage throughout history.

Collection of The Richard Hunt Trust

Monumental

Maquette for Wisdom Bridge

ca. 1986–90

Cast bronze

Wisdom Bridge marked the entrance to the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library for decades. The sculpture shows two forms reaching toward each other over a passage, evoking the sharing of knowledge between generations.

Collection of the Richard Hunt Trust

Monumental

Maquette for Book Bird

1985

Cast bronze

The Book Bird Award was created in 1985 for the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) to recognize community leaders for their extraordinary philanthropy and volunteer service. The Obama Foundation commissioned a large-scale Book Bird (2023), based on the UNCF award, which will be located at the Library Reading Garden at the Obama Presidential Center when it opens in 2026.

Collection of The Richard Hunt Trust

Monumental

Maquette for I Have Been to the Mountain

1977
Cast bronze
Hunt named this sculpture after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last sermon delivered the evening before he was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. That evening, King was prophetic: “I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land.” I Have Been to the Mountain was unveiled at an outdoor pedestrian mall in downtown Memphis on the ninth anniversary of King’s assassination.

Collection of the Richard Hunt Trust

Monumental

Maquette for Freeform

1990
Stainless steel

Freeform is a two-and-a-half-story-high sculpture above the entrance of the Michael A. Bilandic Building in Chicago, which serves as an aspirational beacon of freedom for the administrative and court complex. The flickering steel shapes are a reminder of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and how the city’s ambitious architects, artists, and social reformers rebuilt, not just the structures, but also created new social contracts with the people of Chicago.

Collection of the Richard Hunt Trust

Monumental

Maquette for Freedmen’s Column

1989
Cast bronze

Freedmen’s Column draws attention to the freedmen, Black men and women who were born into, bought, or otherwise obtained their freedom. The sculpture commemorates the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was established in March 1865, shortly before the end of the Civil War to provide education to ex-slaves. Oliver Otis Howard (1830–1909), Howard University’s founder, was the bureau’s first director.

Collection of the Richard Hunt Trust

Monumental

Site model for Eagle Columns

1989
Cast bronze and aluminum

Eagle Columns is located in Jonquil Park, adjacent to Hunt’s Lill Ave. studio in Chicago. This public sculpture honors Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld (1847–1902). Hunt’s homage to Altgeld is inspired by Illinois poet Vachel Lindsay’s (1879–1931) poem, “The Eagle That Is Forgotten,” which praised Altgeld’s courage for pardoning three activists wrongly convicted in the 1886 Haymarket Affair.

Collection of The Richard Hunt Trust

Monumental

Arching and Ascending

2022

Welded bronze

Collection of The Richard Hunt Trust

Monumental

Model for Middle Passage Monument

1987
Cast bronze

Hunt’s Model for Middle Passage Monument is a tribute to the over twelve million Africans that passed between the African continent and the Americas. Like Hunt, many Black artists have made maquettes and designs for monuments that depict the origins of American racism. However, no singular memorial exists to commemorate the lives lost to the horrors of the Triangle Slave Trade. Hunt was inspired by his friend Robert Hayden’s poem, “Middle Passage” (begun in 1941, revised 1962), which uses powerful language to capture the visceral terror of the crossing: “a voyage through death to life upon these shores.”

Collection of The Richard Hunt Trust

Monumental

From the Sea

1983
Welded bronze

In 1983, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. became the first private American citizen to be honored with a federal holiday. The National Black McDonald’s Operators Association helped lead a successful grassroots movement to honor Dr. King. To commemorate the fifteen-year struggle to attain this recognition, McDonald’s Corporation commissioned From the Sea for its headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois. King’s 1956 sermon, “The Death of Evil upon the Seashore,” inspired this work. King said, “There is a Red Sea in history that ultimately comes to carry the forces of goodness to victory, and that same Red Sea closes in to bring doom and destruction to the forces of evil.”

Private Collection

Monumental

From the Ground Up

1989

Cast and welded bronze

The life of Mary McLeod Bethune (1875–1955) inspired this towering bronze sculpture, From the Ground Up. Born into a family of sharecroppers in South Carolina, Bethune spent her childhood working in the same cotton fields her parents worked while enslaved. The family eventually saved enough to purchase the land from their former slaveholder. Educated in Chicago, Bethune returned South to found a school that later became Bethune-Cookman University, a model for historically Black colleges and universities. Bethune led several national organizations that championed racial and gender equity and advised the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. This work was displayed for three decades near Bethune’s home in Washington, DC.

Private Collection

Monumental

Steel Garden

2013

Welded stainless steel

Renowned Chicago artist Richard Hunt designed Steel Garden to announce the beginning of a 2013 extension of Chicago’s DuSable Lake Shore Drive and the redevelopment of the former U.S. Steel South Works property in South Chicago. The sculpture draws on the role steel played in reshaping Chicago’s social and economic circumstances. From ashes of The Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which destroyed over three square miles of the city, to the Chicago steel yards that helped erect the world’s first modern skyscrapers - Hunt was also a student of the growth of natural forms and the strength of metal. Steel Garden combines both these interests into a new soaring form connected to the heritage of Chicago and the role Illinois played as a destination of African Americans during the Great Migration.

Monumental

Richard Hunt was born on the South Side of Chicago. He graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago but taught himself to weld in the basement of his father’s barbershop. Before Hunt was thirty, art critics recognized him as a leading international talent in the newest forms of modern sculpture. Before he died in 2023, Hunt produced over 160 public commissions, more than any other artist in the United States. His sculptures have soaring forms, wings, and arches that evoke aspirational forms of freedom.

Collection of The Richard Hunt Trust

Photography by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum

Monumental

Growing Flowing

First Lady of Illinois, MK Pritzker, and Governor JB Pritzker commissioned Growing Flowing for the Lincoln Parlor in the Governor’s Mansion. Abraham Lincoln introduced the appropriations bill for the mansion, and it has been the home of every governor of Illinois since 1855. The contemporary cultural heritage of Illinois is well represented in the home. Along with Hunt, works by artists Theaster Gates, Karl Wirsum, and Gertrude Abercrombie hang on the walls of the mansion.

Collection of Governor and First Lady Pritzker

Photography by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum

Monumental

Hybrid Movement

1986
Welded Cor-Ten steel

Movement for Hunt was intrinsic in his life’s work, creating metal sculpture embued with implied motion. However, the word movement also alluded to his love of music, as it describes a self-contained part of a musical score. In the mid-1940s, Hunt played the violin in the Abraham Lincoln Youth Orchestra on the South Side of Chicago, setting the stage for a lifetime of musical appreciation and inspiration for his sculptural forms. Hybrid Movement captures the implied vitality of animalistic locomotion and the progression of sound through a musical composition.

Collection of Marlou Johnston

Monumental

Centennial

1969
Welded Cor-Ten steel

Collection of The Richard Hunt Trust
Originally commissioned for the Centennial Forum, Loyola University Chicago

Library

Library

Hunt read widely. He drew inspiration from beyond the visual arts to poetry, biology, histories of the African continent, zoology, and music as sources of interest. These books are a selection gathered from Hunt’s studios and represent a small portion of the breadth of his library.

Library

Portrait of Richard Hunt by Harry Ahn

Oil on canvas
Collection of Harry Ahn

Harry Ahn’s Portrait of Richard Hunt won the William F. Draper Grand Prize at the Portrait Society of America’s The Art of the Portrait conference in Washington, DC in 2010. Pictured with Hunt is the sculpture Sea Change (1986), which was originally commissioned for and installed at Northern Trust, Chicago and is now installed at Loyola University’s Institute of Environmental Sustainability in Chicago.

Library

Portrait of Richard Hunt by Simmie Knox

1985

Oil on canvas

A portrait of Richard Hunt with his sculpture Arching (1985). Simmie Knox was born to sharecroppers in segregated Alabama. His skill as a portrait artist made him sought after by Black elites and Washington officials. President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton commissioned Knox for their official White House portraits after the suggestion of Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The commission made Knox the first Black artist to paint the official portraits of the president and first lady of the United States.

Collection of BK Fulton and Jaqueline Stone

Photography by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum

Library

State of Illinois Proclamation

In 2023, April 24 was designated “Richard Hunt Day” by Governor JB Pritzker and championed by the First Lady of Illinois, MK Pritzker.

Collection of the Richard Hunt Trust

Library

National Council on the Arts Presidential Appointment of Richard Hunt

In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Hunt the first African American visual artist on the council. Hunt would become the fourth African American on the council after Marian Anderson, Ralph Ellison, and Duke Ellington.

The collection of the Richard Hunt Trust

Library

Maquette for Hero Ascending

2024

Cast bronze

Collection of The Richard Hunt Trust

Once completed, the sculpture will add to national efforts to commemorate the legacy of Emmett Till and his mother. The Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument was established by President Joe Biden in 2023 in several locations: Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, where funeral services for Till were held September 3-6, 1955; on the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi at the site where Till’s body was left; and the county courthouse where an all-white jury acquitted the accused.

Hero Ascending completes the work Hunt started in his basement studio nearly seventy years earlier when he created a tribute, Hero’s Head, to grapple with the terror of racism. Now, Hunt is providing us with everything that Hero’s Head did for him. Hero Ascending will be an indelible memorial to those lost to racial violence and provide a soaring monument to a new future.

Library

"To me, metal is alive. The forms tell their own story - How they resisted the torch and hammer"

- RICHARD HUNT

Media

Media

Segment from "Five African American Artists" feature

National Archives film featuring 5 African American artists from 1971

Copyright: National Archives - U.S. Information Agency

Run time: 6:24 minutes

Media

Legendary Landmarks Celebration 2017

Feature on Richard Hunt from 2017 created by Illinois Landmarks

Copyright: Illinois Landmarks

run time: 3:05 minutes

Media

Feature on Richard Hunt from the Obama Foundation, 2022

Richard Hunt is creating a sculpture for the Obama Presidential Center. In so many ways, Richard’s life and work are the embodiment of the Center's belief that art has the power to connect, transform, and inspire us.

At the Center, Richard’s “Book Bird” sculpture will live outside a branch of the Chicago Public Library. This beautiful piece encapsulates the progress one can make through reading—embodying the inspiration the Center's hope all young people take away when they visit the Obama Presidential Center.

Copyright: Obama Foundation

To learn more, visit obama.org/the-center/richard-hunt

Run time: 6:02 minutes

Media

Studs Terkel Interviews Richard Hunt, c. 1960

Historian and Pulitzer Prize winner Studs Terkel interviews Richard Hunt in his studio.

Copyright: Studs Terkel archives

Run time: 14:06 minutes

Catalog

Catalog

Freedom in Form: Richard Hunt Catalog

117-page full color hard cover book, Freedom in Form: Richard Hunt presents Hunt’s artistic achievement within the national narrative of the struggle for freedom and the halting delivery of liberty to all people—a history and heritage that motivated Hunt’s seventy years of making art in America. Filled with stunning images and insightful essays, this book takes readers inside the “Freedom in Form: Richard Hunt” exhibition created by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill. The catalogue features a director’s foreword by Christina Shutt; a foreword by Rev. Michael J. Garanzini, SJ, past president of Loyola University Chicago; and new essays by curator Ross Stanton Jordan, Hunt’s biographer, Jon Ott, and historian Timothy J. Gilfoyle, PhD. The essays tell his story and unquestioned dedication to his art, addressing the connections to the theme of freedom and figures in Black history. The catalogue documents his professional journey, provides a listing of his public works in Illinois, and includes special features on Hunt’s studio, tools and personal library. The publication also includes photographs of three dozen groundbreaking sculptures by Hunt and almost as many images of the legendary artist.

Purchase

Catalog

Limited Edition 5-color Silk Screen Commemorative Poster

Designed and printed by Illinois artist Thom Whalen, these posters promote Freedom in Form: Richard Hunt at the Loyola University Museum of Art after the exhibition's run at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

A total of 110 posters were created they are 12.5" w x 19" h and they fit perfectly in an 11x13 matte or frame.

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Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

Produced by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum

Curator: Ross Stanton Jordan

Producer: Lance Tawzer, ALPLM Director of Exhibits and Shows

Acknowledgments

SPECIAL THANKS

Ryan Campagna, Owner and Director, Chicago Fine Arts Solutions
DePaul Art Museum
The DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center
BK Fulton and Jaqueline Stone
The Richard Hunt Legacy Foundation
Illinois Governor and First Lady Pritzker
The Illinois State Museum
Simmie Knox, Artist
Erik Lowe, Owner, Vector Custom Fabrication
Ken Merlau, The Richard Hunt Trust
Jon Ott, Richard Hunt’s Official Biographer
Molly Ott, The Richard Hunt Legacy Foundation
Eric Stephenson, The Richard Hunt Trust
Harriet Stratis, The Richard Hunt Trust
Anna Weiss-Pfau, Third Coast Conservation
Marlou and Charlie Johnston
Harry Ahn, Artist

Acknowledgments

Graphic Designer: Jackie Tokarz

ALPLM TEAM
Tom Conway, Jennifer Kilby, Exhibit Fabrication
Jade Kastel, Library Services Director–Loans
Anna Dvorachek, Registrar
Ed MacMurdo, Attractions Coordinator
Shannon Murphy, Exhibit Design
Bonnie Parr, Conservator
Matt West, Painter
Garret West, Nick Williams, Kevin Cline, Wes Abbott, Technicians
Kurt Williams, Tech Director/Photographer
Randy Irwin, Original Soundtrack Composer/Arranger

Acknowledgments

Photo Credits:

David Gunn
Howard University
The Richard Hunt Trust
Nathan Keay
Cal Kowal
Krasl Art Center
Nancy Livengood
Paul Natkin
The Obama Foundation
Suzanne Seed
Rana Segal
Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
Jyoti Srivastava

Acknowledgments

ALPLM ADMINISTRATION

Christina Shutt, Executive Director
Mark Mahoney, Chief of Staff
Christen Stanley, Chief Operating Officer
Jeramy Tedrow, Chief Information Officer
Gloria Legette, Chief Legal Council
Marlene Allen, Director of Human Resources
Joe Crain, Director of Programming and Public Engagement
Dorothy Hutchinson-Gross, Director of Facilities and Sustainability
Tammy Miner, Chief Financial Officer
Nalo Mitchell, Legislative Director
Christopher Wills, Director of Communications

Acknowledgments

LOYOLA UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATION

John G. Schreiber, Board Chair–Board of Trustees
Mark C. Reed, EdD, President
Thomas M. Kelly, Senior Vice President for Administration
Douglas W. Woods, PhD, Provost and Chief Academic Officer
Keith M. Champagne, PhD, Vice President for Student Development
Dawn Collins, Assistant Vice President of Campus Support, Conferences and Auxiliary Services
Kyle Mathers, MA, Museum Manager and Curator–LUMA
Hannah Luchtenburg, MA, Museum Coordinator–LUMA
Judy Sunvold, MEd, Director of Conference Services and Concierge-WTC & HSC
Rev. Michael J. Garanzini, SJ, former President
Timothy J. Gilfoyle, PhD, Professor of History

Project Partners

Project Partners

About Ross Stanton Jordan, Curator

Ross Stanton Jordan is Curatorial Manager at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in Chicago, IL. He is a curator interested in the confluence of American politics, visual culture, and artistic production. Since coming to Chicago in 2010, first as a graduate student and then as a full-time staff member of SAIC’s Department of Exhibitions and Exhibitions Studies, Ross expanded curricular exhibitions on the campus and transformed graduate and undergraduate led exhibitions and programs into research driven and collaborative experiences. Ross also made himself a vital presence in Chicago’s art community, curating six independent exhibitions over the last five years in several of Chicago’s tenacious arts venues. Previously, Ross was a 12-month intern in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art where he was a contributor to the museum’s blog Inside/Out and provided research support for exhibitions including Lee Bontecou: All Freedom in Every Sense (2010), Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art (2011) and Abstract Expressionist New York (2011). Ross is the recipient of the Studio Art Fellowship, Trinity College; the Graduate Curatorial Fellowship, SAIC; a 2015 ACRE Curatorial Fellowship; and was a 2014/15 inaugural curator-in-residence at the Chicago Cultural Center. He holds a Bachelors of Arts in Studio Arts from Connecticut College and dual Masters Degrees in Art History and Arts Administration and Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Project Partners

About LUMA

Loyola University Museum of Art (LUMA) provides a space for artistic expression that illuminates the experiences of humanity and the spirit through connection, engagement, and reflection. As a university museum, LUMA supports the power of students' artistry and their ability to inspire and educate.

LUMA was founded in 2005 on Loyola’s Water Tower Campus and is located on the Magnificent Mile in Lewis Towers, a historic 1926 Gothic Revival building. The museum, with 25,000 square feet, contains eight main exhibition galleries, the William G. and Marilyn M. Simpson Lecture Hall, the Solomon Cordwell Buenz Library of Sacred Art and Architecture, the Museum Shop, the Push Pin Gallery, and the Harlan J. Berk Ltd. Works on Paper Gallery.

The museum also interprets and displays the Martin D’Arcy, S.J. Collection, which focuses on European Art from the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Baroque eras. Established in 1969, the collection was originally exhibited in the Elizabeth M. Cudahy Memorial Library on Loyola’s Lake Shore Campus. In addition to rotating exhibitions, LUMA presents an annual holiday exhibit, Art and Faith of the Crèche: The Collection of James and Emilia Govan, displaying nearly 100 nativity scenes. Each year, different crèches are highlighted within the 700-piece collection.

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Project Partners

About The Richard Hunt Legacy Foundation

The Richard Hunt Legacy Foundation was established as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization at the direction of its founder, Richard Hunt. The foundation welcomes support from all who appreciate the incredible contributions of one of America's most important sculptors.

Mission
The Richard Hunt Legacy Foundation advances public awareness, education, and appreciation of the life and art of American sculptor Richard Hunt.

Vision
The Richard Hunt Legacy Foundation's vision is to ensure that future generations fully appreciate the life and art of the American sculptor Richard Hunt by encouraging, inspiring, facilitating, educating, and supporting the public’s understanding of his work and his place in American and art history. In addition, the foundation aims to inspire the next generation of sculptors and artists.

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