Internationally renowned African-American sculptor Richard Hunt headlines the SCAD Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Annual Lecture Series on African-American Art, with his lecture at Trustee’s Theater. The lecture itself will center on his personal experiences, career work and his development as a studio artist versus a factory artist.
Hunt’s illustrious career in the arts spans nearly 50 years. His awards and accolades include a membership appointment to the National Council on the Arts by President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Guggenheim Fellowship award and a Tamarind Artist Fellowship from the Ford Foundation. Hunt is also noted as the first African-American sculptor to exhibit a major retrospective showing at the Museum of Modern Art.
Born in Chicago in 1935, Hunt found his passion for art at an early age. His mother, a musical artist and teacher, introduced him to the art world with drawing and painting classes throughout high school. Hunt realized that sculpture was his medium of choice while attending the Junior School of the Art Institute. He continued to develop his sculpting skills while at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Most of Hunt’s early work consisted of welding “found” objects in assemblages representing figurative and linear designs. He began exhibiting his work around Chicago at art fairs and The Artists of Chicago and Vicinity Shows. During that time, he also became one of the youngest artists to exhibit work in the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair.
Hunt’s artwork ranges from a few inches to several feet in stature. Over 100 of his mammoth scale outdoor sculptural commissions populate several cities around the country including Chicago, Los Angeles, Memphis, Tenn. and Harlem, N.Y. Permanent collection pieces and exhibitions inhabit museums around the world from the Twentieth Century in Vienna, to the National Museum of Israel, The National Gallery in Washington D.C. and the MOMA in New York. Recently, one of Hunt’s sculptures in Harlem, N.Y. has undergone restoration in an effort to revitalize the area and preserve his work for future generations.
In a telephone interview Hunt said, “A career in the arts is a career of life-long learning.” Not very comfortable giving career advice, Hunt suggested that students of the arts should follow their passion. Hunt also said, “You have to want to do that [form of art] more than anything else. It’s not a matter of choosing between things you like, but doing something you can’t live without.”
On the subject of if Hunt thinks about the affect his work will have on the next generation, he said, “I tend to think of the here and now. I look at art history, the artists that came before that were great influences. Their impact was left to chance whether they impacted the world.” Most influences for Hunt come from nature, history and current events. His bronze sculpture “Middle Passage,” one of the highlighted pieces of the exhibition, has an overwhelming historical influence, while works like “Ariel Meander” show an intense nature-based influence.
His exhibition, “Richard Hunt: Promethean Mythmaker” at the SCAD Museum of Art will highlight sculptures, paintings and lithographs of his most recent work. The exhibition opens Feb. 6 and is scheduled to run until Mar. 31. His lecture at the Trustees Theater on Feb 5 at 7:30 p.m. will also be Web cast to SCAD-eLearning and the SCAD-Atlanta and Lacoste campuses. The National Endowment for the Arts awarded the SCAD Museum of Art $10,000 in support of the lecture series showcasing Hunt and his work. For more information on Hunt and his work, visit his Web site: www.richardhunt.us.
Photos by Tiffany Cullen