“In the name of Black Determination, Richard Hunt cannot have a retrospective at MOMA [sic].”
In 1970, Faith Ringgold was part of Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC), a group of artists organizing for political and economic reforms at museums. AWC had been agitating for the inclusion of more Black artists, and Ringgold had been in correspondence with John Hightower, then the director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. When MoMA announced that it would be holding two solo exhibitions of Black artists—the painter Romare Bearden and the rising sculptor Richard Hunt—Ringgold was not pleased.
“Mr. Hunt disavows all connections with being black, having a black experience, or black problem of any kind,” continued Ringgold, in her 1970 letter to Hightower. “It was Black Determination which got a retrospective in the first place. Surely a man like Mr. Hunt, who dares deny the existence of such a force, should not be the one to first sample the fruits of it.”
Of course, Hunt didn’t disavow his Blackness, as Ringgold alleged. Instead, he said that he didn’t much concern himself with the “problem” of the “aesthetics of Black art.” “In terms of my work,” he said, “I have a certain kind of ideal that I want to attain and I find myself being able to do that as a Black man in America and living in a Black community.”
Hunt did have his MoMA exhibition, in 1971—the museum’s first retrospective of a Black sculptor in its then 42-year history. This debate over what makes a Black artist, or an artist Black, is alluded to in the commanding “Freedom in Form: Richard Hunt” exhibition now on view at the Loyola University Museum of Art (LUMA), following its 2024 debut at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum under Lance Tawzer, director of exhibits and shows. (You can find more detail on it in the phenomenal catalog.) But that debate is at the heart of the show, concerned as it is with both the freedom evinced in so many of Hunt’s soaring metal sculptures and his freedom as an artist to buck external pressures and create what he wanted to create.
“Freedom in Form: Richard Hunt”
Through 11/15: Wed–Sat, 10 AM–5 PM, Loyola University Museum of Art, 820 N. Michigan, luc.edu/luma/currentexhibitions/freedominformrichardhunt, $15 admission, $12 alumni, military, seniors, students, free for Loyola students, staff, and faculty
Ross Stanton Jordan lecture
Wed 9/10, 6 PM, Loyola University Museum of Art, 820 N. Michigan, luc.edu/luma/toursprogramming, included with museum admission
Panel Discussion: “Landscape of Freedom: The Public Sculpture of Richard Hunt”
Thu 10/23, 6 PM, Loyola University Museum of Art, 820 N. Michigan, luc.edu/luma/toursprogramming, $15
The show, curated by Jane Addams Hull-House Museum curatorial manager Ross Stanton Jordan, also takes pains to situate Hunt—who died in 2023, just as the planning for this exhibition began in earnest—in the context of the ongoing fight for racial equity. In 1960, he took part in a landmark effort to desegregate lunch counters in San Antonio. In 1969, he was part of a group of artists who withdrew their work from an exhibition at the Whitney Museum to protest its failure to include Black curators or community members in a forthcoming exhibition as it had promised.
“The exhibition text begins with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln,” Jordan explained. That kick-started the radicalization of the Republican Party, leading to Reconstruction and the enfranchisement of Black men, among other efforts to equalize society. “I wanted to show, like, how do these violent deaths from racism—how are they transformed into positive energy?”
One of the first sculptures visitors encounter at LUMA is Hero’s Head, made in 1956, while Hunt was still a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The almost life-size piece references the mangled face of Emmett Till, who was killed the year before. Till and Hunt—who grew up in Woodlawn and Englewood—were nearly the same age and lived just a few blocks from one another. As Jordan put it, “That was another violent death that transformed into immense positive energy, that led to the passage of the civil rights and voting rights acts.”
Richard Hunt, Hero’s Head, 1956
Courtesy of White Cube © 2025 The Richard Hunt Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London. Photo © On White Wall
Hunt’s biographer, Jon Ott, writes in the catalog that Hero’s Head was a turning point in Hunt’s work. It was one of his first welded steel sculptures. At the time, Hunt worked out of a basement studio below his father’s barbershop, teaching himself welding when the art form was so new they didn’t offer it in art school. (The black walls of the first gallery are meant to evoke the basement studio.) Prior to this work, Hunt had focused on sculpting figures from daily life, such as animals and circus performers. “From that moment forward in his practice, Hunt incorporated African American themes and heroes into his sculptures,” Ott writes.
As you move further into LUMA’s galleries, the show brightens, the walls now white. The work is installed chronologically, and these galleries echo Hunt’s 1971 purchase of a massive, defunct power substation in Lincoln Park, which was his studio for the remainder of his life. In an era of redlining and entrenched segregation, it was a powerful move.
Also included are ephemeral and historical items: Hunt’s workbench and some of his tools, photographs of him working, a selection of books from his vast library. A particularly delightful addition is a rare video, from 1967, showing Studs Terkel interviewing a young Hunt in his studio. “I wanted to teach people how to look at art, basically,” Jordan said of the video. In it, Terkel acts as an everyman, interpreting Hunt’s abstract works in an instinctual way. “The Studs video is meant to help people feel like, ‘Oh, what you do in front of an artwork is you look at it and what you see is what you get.’ . . . It’s open to you, if you’re open to it.”
Eagle Columns, 1989, is on view in Jonquil Park
© 2025 The Richard Hunt Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Jyoti Srivastava
A series of maquettes depicts some of Hunt’s extant or proposed public sculptures, including the magnificent bronze Swing Low (2016), which hangs in the National Museum of African American History and Culture. A cast bronze model for a monument to the Middle Passage stands on a plinth toward the rear of the show. The piece is dark, with a low profile. It shows a shiplike structure with a passage cutting through it, and a staircase over it. Around it is a floor with an uneven mass of layers, a reference to ocean waves or perhaps the approximately 12 million Africans who were forced to cross over the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas during the slave trade. As the exhibition text notes, “No singular memorial exists to commemorate the lives lost to the horrors of the Triangle Slave Trade,” yet Hunt’s model remains unrealized.
The piece holds special meaning for Jordan, who came across the piece in high school. “It just stuck in my head,” he said. For years, he didn’t know who the artist was, until he was putting together this exhibition and saw the title on a checklist. “He creates work that stays with you.”
Though Hunt was one of the foremost sculptors of his time, he hasn’t had as many major exhibitions in Chicago as you might think. (He was also the most prolific sculptor of public art in the U.S.—with more than 160 pieces on view across the country, and more than 70 on view in Illinois.) So it certainly feels like a privilege to be able to take such a close, considered look at his life and work right here in Chicago—the city he lived in virtually all of his life. You’ll certainly come away with a deeper understanding of Hunt’s commitment to freedom.
Hero Ascending, one of the last pieces Hunt designed, will be on view outside the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley House Museum.
“Hunt diverged from his contemporaries,” Jordan said. “He stuck with his artistic vision through immense pressure from peers to create work that was easily identifiable as Black and political. . . . At the time that hurt him in the art market, and [in an] art historical way. But now, looking back, I admire, and I think many people do admire the fact that it means many, many things to be a Black artist. They’re allowed to create what they want to when they want to because it’s an expression of their own sensibilities, own sense of creativity, and that cannot be curtailed, not even by someone’s peers. And that’s a powerful message, I think, for artists working today, too.”
It’s a sentiment voiced by Hunt himself, in a quote on display in the gallery: “I am interested more than anything else in being a free person. To me, that means that I can make what I want to make, regardless of what anyone else thinks I should make. My art is about art—embracing a vision of the future that is unlike past futures.”
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