Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
In 1998, sculptor Richard Hunt, along with painter Ed Paschke, received the first Union League Club of Chicago Distinguished Artist award, becoming a privilege member for life. In 2016 the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, commissioned Hunt to create the monumental bronze sculpture, Swing Low, to welcome visitors in the grand lobby. He has produced over 125 public sculptures throughout the country and continues to achieve and excel at the highest level.
The son of a librarian and barber, Hunt’s mother nurtured his artistic inklings. As a boy, he visited the Field Museum of Natural History, where the African art collection inspired him and excursions to the zoo gave rise to his respect for nature and anthropomorphic forms. These visual engagements would inform his art for decades. Displaying talent from an early age, he enrolled in the youth class at the Art Institute of Chicago and would later matriculate with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Education at the School of the Art Institute. Sculpture appealed to him most, so he set up a studio in his bedroom to model clay, and later learned welding in the basement of his father’s barber shop!
Hunt sought unusual materials for his sculptures. Searching through the local scrapyards in Chicago, he repurposed discarded metal and created lyrical forms that often evoked recognizable forms in nature. His originality and bravura welding caused a sensation in the art world. When he graduated from college in 1957, the Modern Museum of Art in New York acquired a small sculpture by him, Arachne—an unusual accolade for such a young man! By age thirty-six, another great honor came his way: he was the first African American sculptor to be awarded a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Over the years, he received many prestigious awards, among them the Chicago Art Institute Logan, Palmer, and Campana prizes; fellowships from the Guggenheim, Tamarind, and Ford Foundations; the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and the Lifetime Achievement Award, International Sculpture Center—to name only a few.
A thoughtful cerebral artist, he once remarked: "…it is my intention to develop the kind of forms Nature might create if only heat and steel were available to her." [Richard Hunt quoted in Exhibition flier, Richard Hunt, (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Art Gallery, 1966].
Remarkably, his works represent a metamorphosis as he transforms material conceived for other uses into elegant sculpture. The Union League Club owns two works by him. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man displays a strong Cubist influence and leaning towards African sculpture. The self-portrait, though abstracted, offers charming realistic touches, such as eyelashes. The form is fluid, if not lyrical in the undulating strips of welded bronze. His work has oft been described as "drawings in metal."
