Richard Hunt, recognised as one of the United States’ greatest sculptors whose monuments are spread throughout the country, has died. Over a 70-year career, Hunt has created over 150 public works and had hundreds of exhibitions. Formally, his works explore the interplay between industrial materials and organic forms: ‘It is my intention to develop the kind of forms Nature might create if only heat and steel were available to her’, he has said. Hunt has made major sculptures and monuments for major figures in US history, including Martin Luther King Jr. – I Have Been to the Mountaintop (1977) in Memphis, Tennessee, where King was killed – and the journalist and civil rights activist Ida B. Wells on the South Side of Chicago, The Light of Truth (2021). His bronze Swing Low (2016) was commissioned for and hangs at the Central Hall of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC.
Born in Chicago, the city where he lives his whole life, Hunt graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1957. The year before that, when he was still a student, his sculpture Arachne was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He was also the first Black sculptor to have had a retrospective at the museum, in 1971, aged thirty-five. Hunt was commissioned to make a public work, Book Bird, for the Obama Presidential Library in Chicago, which is currently under construction. The sculpture shows a bird flying from a book. White Cube will have a major exhibition of the artist’s work, the first since he joined the gallery in November 2023, in its New York location in spring 2024.
