His dying was introduced in an announcement on his web site, which didn’t cite a trigger.
In a profession that spanned practically seven a long time, Mr. Hunt introduced a buoyant lyricism to the heaviest of supplies, creating works of metal, bronze, copper and iron that rose skyward like bushes or fireplace or unfold outward like wings. His sculptures included public items just like the 35-foot-tall “Flight Kinds” (2002), which greets guests to Chicago’s Halfway Worldwide Airport, and “Swing Low” (2016), a birdlike 1,500-pound bronze work suspended within the foyer of the Smithsonian’s Nationwide Museum of African American Historical past and Tradition.
“The entire thought of imparting motion into metallic is core to Richard’s aesthetic,” his biographer Jon Ott stated in a telephone interview. Mr. Hunt’s work was full of pictures of flight and ascension, he added, pushed partly by the artist’s abiding concern for freedom. “That’s freedom from segregation, freedom from slavery,” Ott stated. “But it surely’s additionally about inventive freedom — the liberty to create what he needs to create.”
Mr. Hunt’s early profession paralleled the rise of the trendy civil rights motion. Through the summer time of 1955, as a 19-year-old artwork scholar, he taught himself to weld — establishing a metallic store in his mother and father’ basement on the South Aspect of Chicago — and went to the open-casket funeral of Emmett Until, the Black teenager whose homicide helped expose the world to the horrors of American racism on the whole and the Jim Crow-era South specifically.
Kidnapped, tortured and shot within the head after allegedly whistling at a White girl in a Mississippi grocery retailer, Until got here from Woodlawn, the identical Chicago neighborhood as Mr. Hunt, and grew up two blocks from the house the place Mr. Hunt was born. “What occurred to [Till] may have occurred to me,” Mr. Hunt stated.
Months after Until’s funeral, he accomplished considered one of his first welded metal sculptures, the modest however searing “Hero’s Head” (1956), a memorial to the slain teenager. He later produced sculptures of outstanding Black People together with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Mary McLeod Bethune, Jesse Owens, Hobart Taylor Jr. and Ida B. Wells, along with making items that commemorated the Center Passage and the Nice Migration.
“Sculpture is just not a self-declaration,” he once said, “however a voice of and for my individuals — over all, a wealthy material; below all, the dynamism of the African American individuals.”
Politics and historical past had been just one department of inspiration for Mr. Hunt, who additionally drew from nature, mythology and the numerous sounds of classical music (for his extra deliberate, monumental works) and jazz (for his studio items, which had been extra improvisational). He made lithographs, drawings and soldered wire figures, and early in his profession he was recognized for fantastical metallic sculptures like “Arachne” (1956), which was bought by the Museum of Trendy Artwork in New York when he was simply 21, and “Hero Construction” (1958), a fusion of discarded auto elements now on view on the Artwork Institute of Chicago.
In 1971, the MoMA organized his first major retrospective, bringing collectively 50 of his sculptures together with drawings and prints. It was the primary time the museum had mounted a retrospective for an African American sculptor, in line with Ott. Mr. Hunt was solely 35.
“There are actually only a few American sculptors of Mr. Hunt’s era who’ve produced a comparable physique of labor so early of their growth,” wrote New York Occasions artwork critic Hilton Kramer, calling Mr. Hunt “an artist who stays completely impartial of each present fashions and of his personal previous successes.”
Presidents additionally took word. Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Mr. Hunt to the Nationwide Council on the Arts in 1968, and Invoice Clinton introduced his plow-like piece “Farmer’s Dream” to the White Home grounds in 1994 for a showcase on trendy sculpture. Barack Obama, who praised Mr. Hunt in an announcement as “one of many best artists ever to return out of Chicago,” commissioned him in 2022 to create a chunk for a public library on the Obama Presidential Middle, which is scheduled to open in Chicago in 2025.
The library sculpture was considered one of Mr. Hunt’s final accomplished works, together with a sculptural mannequin for a monument to Until that introduced his profession full circle. The monument, a piece of welded bronze referred to as “Hero Ascending,” is to be accomplished by his studio crew and positioned exterior Until’s childhood residence.
The older of two kids, Richard Howard Hunt was born in Chicago on Sept. 12, 1935. His father was a barber, his mom a librarian. They steered him towards music, enrolling Mr. Hunt in violin courses as a boy, however he took to the visible arts as an alternative.
Mr. Hunt was influenced by an aunt who made watercolors, together with an image of two canines that he stored in his studio for many years, and by reveals he noticed on the Artwork Institute of Chicago, together with a 1953 exhibition that featured works by Alberto Giacometti and Julio González, igniting his curiosity in metallic sculpture.
At 13, he started taking junior courses on the museum’s artwork faculty. He acquired a bachelor’s diploma from the varsity in 1957 and spent a 12 months in Europe, finding out artwork and dealing at a bronze foundry in Florence, earlier than being drafted into the Military in 1958.
Shortly earlier than his discharge in 1960, he participated in a deliberate sit-in at a Woolworth’s in San Antonio, the place he was stationed. Stress from the native NAACP chapter led to what’s typically described as the primary peaceable and voluntary lunch-counter integration marketing campaign within the South, with Mr. Hunt sitting down for lunch in his uniform with out protest.
Mr. Hunt returned to Chicago, the place he labored because the early Seventies out of a former electrical substation within the Lincoln Park neighborhood, typically sleeping on a mattress on the ground along with his instruments and sculptures unfold out round him. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1962, served as an artist-in-residence at faculties together with Harvard and Yale, and commenced what he called his “second profession” as a public sculptor with “Play” (1967), a commissioned metal sculpture within the Chicago suburbs. Greater than 160 of his sculptures now adorn cities in two-dozen states.
His first marriage, to varsity classmate Bettye Scott in 1957, resulted in divorce. He was later married for six years to Lenora Cartright, a former Chicago commissioner of human companies, till her dying in 1989. His third marriage, to Dutch artwork and antiquities supplier Anuschka Menist, resulted in divorce.
Survivors embody a daughter from his first marriage, Cecilia Hunt; and a sister.
Mr. Hunt generally spoke about his work in cosmic phrases, describing every bit as “a step towards an ever extra good union of area, time, and movement.” But it additionally had a deeply private significance.
“I have to, I can, I’ll present the bodily proof of my and my household’s having lived upon this Earth, this planet,” he wrote in an essay printed on his website in 2021. “Within the nice scheme of issues, it’s lower than a drop within the bucket, nevertheless it pleases me to have the ability to depart this proof right here for a time.”
