Richard Hunt was born in (1935 - 2023) in Chicago, later attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work garnered acclaim almost from the very genesis of his career as a sculptor, drawing the attention of New York curators and art dealers visiting Chicago. As a young artist, he received various prestigious honors, prizes, and fellowships that supported his artistic practice and enabled him to travel to Europe, including the Mr. and Mrs. Frank Logan Prize, the Walter M. Campana Prize, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship.
In the 1950s and 1960s, he took up teaching positions at the Yale School of Art and Architecture in New Haven and the Chouinard Art School (now California Institute of Arts) in Los Angeles, where he befriended sculptor Melvin Edwards. In 1971, at only thirty-five years old, he had his first retrospective at the MoMA and became the first Black sculptor to do so. Alongside his decades of constant artistic production, he also took up positions in public office: in 1968 he was appointed to serve on the National Council of the Arts; throughout the 1980s he served as Commissioner of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American Art; and from 1994-97 he served on the Institution's National Board of Directors. Hunt continued to live and work in his large studio in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, until his death in 2023.
His work resides in many public spaces in New York, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and particularly in Chicago, and his over 160 public works of art make him the most prolific site-specific artist in the world. His work is also housed in the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Baltimore Museum of Art; Cleveland Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Our gallery has been honored to celebrate Hunt's historic body of work by exhibiting his work over the years.