Anyone who has visited Bronzeville lately knows the power of Chicago sculptor Richard Hunt. His massive The Light of Truth Ida B. Wells National Monument, on the former site of the Ida B. Wells Homes, stands a majestic 35 feet tall and weighs more than 14,000 pounds. On a foggy day, the tip of the bronze structure disappears into the mist, making it feel even bigger than its three towering stories.
The monument speaks to Black history and the Civil Rights Movement, two themes persistent in the work of the late sculptor, who died in 2023 at age 88. Now, a new exhibition aims to tell more of his story. “Freedom in Form: Richard Hunt,” which opens Friday at the Loyola University Museum of Art, explores his 70-year career, starting with his early days as a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Outside of Hunt’s own work, the exhibit includes portraits and a sculpture of Hunt himself, plus his tools and workbench and a selection of books and photos from his personal collection. All of these items are arranged chronologically to tell the story of an internationally recognized artist with more than 160 public art commissions, eclipsing any other American sculptor.
“We never intended for this to be a legacy show,” said Lance Tawzer, director of exhibits and shows at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Museum in Springfield, where the exhibit opened before coming to Chicago. The idea for the exhibition started in 2019, and Tawzer’s plan was to open during Hunt’s lifetime.
“I met him twice,” Tawzer said. “It was humbling. You’re talking about a guy who lived in his studio for much of his career. They built a loft, and he lived on a mattress on the floor in an unheated, un-air-conditioned space, and he worked and worked. He lived for working.”
Tawzer said shaking Hunt’s calloused hand was an instant reminder that he worked with metal for the entirety of his adult life. The exhibit features Hunt’s tools, some of which Hunt made himself, designing them for his style of metalwork. On the first day Tawzer met him, he said the artist was grinding metal, wearing his face shield — which is now on display — even though he was using a walker.
“The exhibition really gives us a chance to understand Hunt as a young artist,” said Ross Stanton Jordan, the exhibit’s curator and curatorial manager at Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. One of the first pieces on display is “Hero’s Head” (1956), which Hunt sculpted when he was 19. He had just attended the open-casket funeral of Emmett Till, the young Chicagoan who was brutally murdered by white men in Mississippi while visiting family in 1956.
“Emmett was Hunt’s neighbor on the South Side of Chicago,” said Jordan. “They only lived a few blocks apart. So when Emmett Till is murdered … his family brings his body back to Chicago. It’s a large public funeral, and Hunt and his family go and see Emmett Till’s body. ‘Hero’s Head’ is a direct response to that experience.”
The welded bust of “Hero’s Head” depicts Till as witnessed by a young Hunt. It is less abstract than the sculptor’s later works, and it clearly portrays a mutilated skull with a fractured eye socket and dislocated bones. The bust is one of Hunt’s most notable pieces; it launched him into a career of metalwork directly responding to key moments in the Civil Rights Movement.
“Hunt was someone who studied history very closely. And even though he’s making abstract artworks, he was responding to history,” Jordan said.
In Hunt’s later works, he is known for using metal — bronze, chrome and Corten steel — to fabricate intricate structures ranging from a few feet to multiple stories high. His abstract sculptures tend to have solid bases that flow into wavy and spiraling patterns so thin and detailed that they almost don’t look like metal. A quote from Hunt on display reads, “To me, metal is alive. The forms tell their own story — how they resisted the torch and hammer.”
Another of the exhibition’s featured pieces, From the Sea (1983), is its own nod to history. Originally commissioned by the McDonald’s Corp. for its headquarters in Oak Brook, the sculpture was inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1956 sermon “The Death of Evil Upon the Seashore.” The bronze sculpture — ordered up the year President Ronald Reagan signed a bill into law making King’s birthday a national holiday — has waves that flow like the sea. Depending on where you stand, it feels like the waves are rushing toward you to sweep you away. Like most of Hunt’s work, this abstract piece is open to be interpreted by the viewer.
What’s not open for interpretation are Hunt’s inspirations. A Black sculptor who responded to decades of political change and racism, his work was supported at times by the federal government. Hunt served on one of the first commissions of the National Endowment for the Arts, in 1968, and was both a direct recipient of federal grants and someone who championed the national support of arts. That fact is not lost on the exhibit’s curator amid recent drastic cuts in funding and staff for the NEA by the Trump administration.
“Right now, we see a lot of attacks on cultural institutions,” Jordan said. “The fact that we’re letting [federal grantmaking] go means that we will have less opportunities for people like Hunt to emerge in the United States.”
The exhibit concludes with a maquette of one Hunt’s last projects: a 15-foot sculpture called Hero Ascending. The piece, an abstract figure spiraling toward the heavens, is destined for the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley House on the South Side of Chicago, set to reopen this year.
Mike Davis is WBEZ’s theater reporter.
