Born in Chicago’s South Side in 1935, Hunt was immersed from an early age in culture, politics and music, often accompanying his mother to the city’s free public museums. In 1953, he received a scholarship to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where he began experimenting with metal after being introduced to the work of Spanish sculptor Julio González in MoMA’s major travelling exhibition, ‘Sculpture of the Twentieth Century’. Here he also encountered the work of other European modernists, including Jean Arp, Constantin Brâncuși, Umberto Boccioni, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Pablo Picasso. Reflecting on this pivotal moment, Hunt articulated a vision for sculpture that would build upon the formal breakthroughs of modernism, while embracing a mode of making that drew from accumulated histories, lived experience and the possibilities of form. ‘It seems to me’, he wrote in 1957, ‘that the seeds of artistic revolution sown, grown and reaped during the last fifty years should see the rich fruits of their harvest nurture a new art in this wiser half century – an art which need not seek strength in revolt, but in the creative pulse of its makers; an art having sinew and gut, as well as heart and soft flesh.’¹

In the autumn of 1955, at just 19 years old, Hunt was among more than 100,000 mourners who attended the open-casket visitation of Emmett Till – a 14-year-old African American boy whose brutal lynching that summer marked a seismic moment in American history. Hero’s Head (1956), one of Hunt’s earliest mature works, stands as the first among several artistic responses dedicated to Till’s legacy. Modestly scaled to the dimensions of a human head and resting on a stainless-steel plinth, the welded steel sculpture preserves the image of Till’s mutilated face. Composed of scrap metal parts, twisted and welded into a complex hierarchy of depths and reliefs, the work’s varied patination melds planes of dark, mantled steel with dapples of burnished gold.

In its confluence of material and conceptual qualities, Hero’s Head prefigured many of the concerns that would define Hunt’s practice. A selection of major early works in the North Galleries, produced between 1955 and 1966, attests to a vital period of technical innovation and conceptual growth – one that established the vocabulary of his mature practice. In works from the mid-1950s, including Construction N and Construction S (both 1956), Hunt combined metal and wood – a hybrid approach he would soon relinquish in favour of working exclusively with metal. Drawn to the material’s capacity for linearity, malleability and spatial dynamism, the expansive open-form sculptures that emerged from this transition articulate Hunt’s deepening engagement with the expressive potential of line, manifesting as three-dimensional ‘drawings-in-space’. Among these, three works in South Gallery I, Opposed Linear Forms (1961), Linear Peregrination (1962) and Linear Sequence (1962), reflect the artist’s sustained fascination with Greek and Roman mythology, drawing on the narratives of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as conceptual touchstones. Elsewhere, the influence of European modernism asserts itself. The spare, attenuated construction of Alberto Giacometti’s figures finds resonance in Man on a Vehicular Construction (1956), a rare figurative expression rendered in soldered wire, while Untitled (1957) engages the jocular surrealism of Picasso and González’s Woman in the Garden (1929–30). The latter – his largest and most ambitious work to date – earned Hunt a fellowship to travel to Europe, where he undertook training in casting and produced his first works in bronze.

During these formative years, Hunt deepened his enquiry into the sculptural potential of various metals, harnessing their distinct material properties to elicit visual associations between organic and industrial form. Coil (1965), a sculpture fashioned from salvaged copper coil, assumes a sinuous, serpent-like configuration, while Tube Form (1966), executed in welded aluminium, evokes the smooth, chitinous exoskeleton of the blue dasher dragonfly. By the latter half of the decade, Hunt’s exploration of linear-spatial extension began to shift towards a greater emphasis on volumetric, self-contained forms. Works such as Opposed Forms (1965), where a bodily mass balances upon three attenuated legs of chromed steel, stands at the threshold of this transition, embodying a composite condition of density and delicacy. More singular and monolithic is Figure Form (1966), crafted from salvaged chrome-plated car bumpers. Its anthropomorphic structure, with its truncated shoulders and emergent wing-like protrusions, invokes the implied flight of the Winged Victory of Samothrace (190 BCE) – a classical motif to which Hunt would repeatedly return.

Two years after unveiling his first public commission, Play, in Chicago in 1969, Hunt, at just 35 years old, became one of the youngest artists and the first African American sculptor to be honoured with a retrospective at MoMA, New York, in 1971. That same year, he relocated to a new studio on West Lill Avenue in Chicago – a vast, light-filled space that enabled him to produce and manoeuvre increasingly monumental works. As large-scale public sculpture assumed a central place in his practice, Hunt largely renounced figuration, embracing instead a more abstract and expansive visual language through which he paid homage to notable African American figures and leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. Motifs of ascension and organic growth, drawn from the natural world, became increasingly evident in these later works – emblematic, for Hunt, of the aspirational and enduring momentum of Black resistance and achievement.

A number of welded bronze and steel sculptures created between the late 1970s and 2023 – displayed in South Gallery II and exhibited alongside a series of wall-based works in welded steel and bronze – exemplifies this shift in form and intent. In South Gallery II, two bronze sculptures – Roman Hybrid and Half Circle Runner (both 1979) – pay tribute to Olympic athlete and civil rights activist Jesse Owens, following his receipt of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1976. Through their fluid, cantilevered forms, the sculptures express the physical prowess of Owens’ body in motion, whilst synthesising Hunt’s capacity to merge historical commemoration with modernist abstraction. The bronze sculpture Dogonese (1985), reflects Hunt’s sustained engagement with African visual languages and symbolic forms. Rising vertically like a ceremonial staff or totem, the sculpture’s angular forms recall the distinctive geometries of Dogon metalwork and ritual objects, while his refined manipulation of bronze aligns the work with European modernist abstraction.

Produced in the final decade of Hunt’s life and installed in the courtyard at Bermondsey, Steel Garden (2013) – a branching, stainless-steel form that rises organically from its base – stands as a testament to Hunt’s unique hybridisation of industrial process, natural form and African American historical reference. Originally commissioned for the entrance of the US Steel Corporation’s mill in Chicago, Steel Garden acknowledges the significance of steel manufacturing for the millions of African Americans who migrated north during the Great Migration, drawn by the economic opportunities and relative freedom offered by industrial centres like Chicago. For Hunt, industrial production embodied transformative potential not unlike that of nature – sustained through growth, resilience and adaptation. This symbolic language finds a compelling counterpart in Reaching Up (2022), exhibited in the 9x9x9 gallery: a large-scale bronze sculpture whose dramatic vertical thrust and bifurcated form terminates in two gestural extensions, evoking the image of a tree. A recurring motif in Hunt’s oeuvre, the tree became, in his own words, ‘symbolic of my inner and outer growth’: its base representing his foundations – ‘the origins of my art, life and family’ – while the uppermost branches reach ‘up and out beyond their tips’.² Having been vocal and active during the Civil Rights Movement, Hunt’s Reaching Up may also be understood as an assertion of African American presence and becoming – his expression of ‘a step toward an ever more perfect union of space, time and motion that reminds us of the dreams and visions that once fuelled our actions and desires’.

At the time of his death, on 16 December 2023, Richard Hunt stood as one of the most respected and acclaimed American sculptors of the 20th century, with more than 170 solo exhibitions and representation in the collections of 125 museums worldwide.