Richard Hunt: Pressure is the first posthumous U.S. institutional survey of sculptor Richard Hunt. The exhibition traces the innovation of Hunt’s sculptural language and his experimentations with form, scale and materiality over more than five decades, and highlights large-scale works in bronze and stainless steel alongside more intimate works and maquettes that engage overtly with the Civil Rights movement and broader themes of social justice in America.
A master of form and monument, Hunt worked in metal, aluminum and bronze to create abstract works that are both fluid and linear, biomorphic and contorted, abstract and brimming with allusions. Coming of age as an artist at a crucial moment in the development of modernist sculpture, Hunt developed a singular voice by innovating on some of the medium’s traditional qualities. His forms often appear crumpled, stretched, or in motion. Early on, he made sculptures that turned found materials, like chromed furniture parts and automobile bumpers, into complex objects that explored extension and horizontality. These abstract works were, however, not divorced from the social realities of a segregated America to which they often subtly alluded. His works, which tell a personal and symbolic story of modern sculpture, draw upon nature, classical mythology and the artist’s cultural heritage. Hunt’s deep engagement with themes of social justice are particularly evident in the over 160 public art commissions created during his lifetime. Though the artist achieved significant recognition at the age of just 35 with a landmark 1971 survey at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he has not been the subject of a large-scale and comprehensive institutional exhibition in decades.
ICA Miami’s exhibition features twenty-five works representing Hunt’s experimentations with form, scale and material from the 1950s to 1990s. Key works include Opposed Linear Forms (1961) and Linear Peregrination(1962), which expand on the idea of “drawing in space;” Hero’s Head (1956), a welded steel sculpture reflecting on the tragedy of Emmett Till, who lived just two blocks away from where Hunt was born; and I Have Been to the Mountain (1977), a maquette for public sculpture depicting a range of mountains or pyramids that references Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final speech. Additional models featured in the exhibition include Freedmen’s Column (1989), installed on the campus of Howard University—the nation’s preeminent HBCU—which alludes to the “freedmen,” Black men and women who were born into, purchased, or otherwise secured their freedom; and Middle Passage Monument (1987), one of Hunt’s still-unrealized monuments, which reflects on the transatlantic slave trade and its enduring impact.
“Richard Hunt: Pressure” is organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and curated by Alex Gartenfeld, Irma and Norman Braman Artistic Director, and Gean Moreno, Director of the Art + Research Center at ICA Miami.
