1956

 

Richard Hunt completed Hero’s Head (1956) less than a year after the brutal murder of a fourteen-year-old African American boy, Emmett Till, who was accused of flirting with a white woman while visiting family in Money, Mississippi. The Hunt family had lived a few blocks from Till’s Chicago home and shared a similar lineage. Both families were part of a generation of migrants who fled racial segregation in the South and made their way to Chicago as a part of the Great Migration. Both families sent their children back South to visit relatives left behind, in Hunt’s case, visits with relatives in Georgia.

 

The Hunt family was among the thousands of mourners who attended Till’s open-casket funeral at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ on Chicago’s South Side on September 6, 1955. The image of Till’s mutilated head circulated widely in the Black press. The murder outraged Black communities, and the image galvanized a new generation of Civil Rights Movement leaders. Already an ambitious artist at nineteen, Hunt had taught himself to weld that summer—training that was not available at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he was enrolled. In his basement studio, Hunt created the welded steel Hero's Head in response to American racial terror. ​​

1967-1969

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"Initially titled The Chase, the primary inspiration of the work was the myth of Diana and Actaeon from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but Hunt has also suggested that the graphic images widely published of police officers and their dogs violently pursuing civil rights activists in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 had also been on his mind. He states, 'In my early work, I took inspiration from classical mythology. After watching demonstrators in Birmingham attacked by dogs, I reflected on the story of Actaeon who, condemned by the goddess Diana, was pursued, and killed by hounds. Both versions of my work titled The Chase were explorations of this theme of pursuit. For my first major public commission Play, I returned to the images of Birmingham.'"
 

- excerpt from Richard Hunt: Monumental, 2023

1968-1969

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Richard Hunt was only 32 when the State of Illinois Sesquicentennial Committee commissioned him to create a sculpture celebrating John Jones (1816–1879), Illinois’ first Black elected official. The style is uncharacteristic of Hunt’s body of work, but Hunt took the commission as a challenge. The artist shows Jones burdened with racial injustice, dragging his foot and weighing down his shoulders. "I made him look as if he is climbing, burdened with weights that are part of him." Hunt said of this sculpture in a profile in Ebony magazine in April 1969. “They show his struggle.”

 

John Jones was a self-educated businessman and racial justice advocate. He was born free in North Carolina and later moved to Chicago with his wife, Mary. There, Jones spent the next two decades demanding the end of the Illinois Black Codes, which barred Black citizens from voting, testifying against whites, receiving public education, entering public accommodation, and public transportation. Free Blacks had to register with the county clerk or risk losing their freedom. Despite the danger, John and Mary used their Chicago home as a stop on the Underground Railroad. They led hundreds of formerly enslaved people to freedom. 

 

John Jones convinced the Illinois legislature to repeal the Black Codes in 1865. Five years later, he became Illinois’ first Black elected official, a Cook County Commissioner. 

1975

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Hunt’s reflections on King’s contributions informed From Here to There, for the Dr. Martin Luther King Community Service Center on Chicago’s South Side.

 

"Two 7-foot-high welded bronze sculptures, each atop a brick pedestal that more than doubled their height, stood about 30 feet apart at the rear of the building. These sculpture elements not only occupy but also bridge space, encouraging viewers to draw spatial and conceptual connections–not just a here and a there but a here to a there. As Hunt explained in publicity materials, by creating a gulf between two fixed points, he was inviting viewers to consider the legacy of the Center’s namesake: 'how King’s movement got started, how far it has gotten, and how far it didn’t go…'" 

 

- excerpt from Richard Hunt: Monumental, 2023

1977

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"The sculpture elicits a wide range of formal associations and has been read as a range of mountains or pyramids, a recumbent sphinx connecting Memphis to Egypt, or a garbage truck referencing the two sanitation workers who were crushed to death in the truck’s trash compactor that set off the sanitation workers’ strike. According to Hunt, 'One of the early models had ... paddle wheels, references to boats on the Mississippi. Part of incorporating them into it had to do with the idea of trying to move the mountain form: energize this sort of solid unmoving thing, which was like the institution of segregation.' Even Hunt’s choice of Cor-Ten Steel resonates with meaning. Cor-Ten Steel is named for its corrosion resistance (Cor) and high tensile strength (Ten) properties. The metal develops a rich brownish-red protective surface when exposed to moisture and oxygen, enforcing the earthy nature of Hunt’s mountain and the resilience of the metal, a metaphor for King’s enduring message of deliverance to the promised land.

 

In 2018, I Have Been to the Mountain became the centerpiece of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Reflection Park. Appropriately, this site in Memphis lies only blocks away from the Mason Temple, where King delivered his final speech, and the Lorraine Motel, where the civil rights leader was assassinated (and in 1991 was rededicated as The National Civil Rights Museum)."

 

- excerpt from Richard Hunt: Monumental, 2023

1977

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Jacob’s Ladder (1977), one of Hunt’s early public commissions, has a ladder motif with layered meaning, which Hunt would revisit throughout his career. Composed of welded bronze and brass, the sculpture stretches 27 feet from the floor to the atrium skylight of the Carter G. Woodson Regional Library in Chicago, Hunt’s largest monument up to that point. Anchored by a mass of welded metal, suggestive of geologic motion like grinding tectonic plates, a heavenly ladder winds toward the ground from the beams above, reaching toward the earth. To Hunt, the sculpture represents freeing man’s soul from earth's turmoil, but it also echoes the fight for freedom from chattel slavery in the American South.

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Sited in a Chicago library named for the historian Carter G. Woodson, who created what would become Black History Month, Jacob’s Ladder represents the freedom education can deliver. The sculpture is located in the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature, one of the largest collections of its kind. Thus Jacob’s Ladder occupies a physical and metaphorical space at the center of documented Black experience.​​

1979

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Half Circle Runner (1979) is a striking bronze sculpture that embodies the essence of athleticism through its abstract design. The piece pays tribute to Jesse Owens, the famous American sprinter who won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, defying Nazi ideology and racial discrimination.

 

The sculpture's sweeping curves and angular shapes mirror the dynamic motion of an athlete sprinting from the starting blocks. Its polished golden surface recalls the Olympic medals, while the cantilevered structure seems to defy gravity, much like Owens himself. The title Half Circle Runner refers to the 200-meter sprint – half of the 400-meter circular Olympic track – an event in which Owens claimed first place and a gold medal. This work captures the physical prowess and historical importance of Owens’s legacy, which remained unmatched by an American track and field athlete for nearly five decades.

 

A celebrated African American figure, Owens received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Gerald Ford in 1976, an event celebrated in Chicago, where he actively worked with disadvantaged youth. Following this recognition, Hunt created Half Circle Runner, alongside another sculpture, Roman Hybrid (1979), both honoring Owens's remarkable speed and significance in modern art.​​

1981

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Richard Hunt’s Spirit of Freedom is installed in Kansas City, Missouri. At the ceremony, the African American city councilman Bruce R. Watkins states that the sculpture and fountain are “dedicated to the men and women who came here a century ago, as slaves, who felled the trees, built the roads, launched their dreams."

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"I have always been interested in the concept of freedom on the personal and universal levels: political freedom, freedom to think and to feel. As an African American living in the United States, obviously, issues like segregation laws, the civil rights movement in the 1960s, or South Africa have been on my mind when I have dealt with the concept of freedom. But freedom also relates to my career as an artist: freedom of mind, thought, and imagination." - Richard Hunt

 

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1983

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In his second major homage to Martin Luther King, Jr., Hunt created the six-foot-tall, welded bronze sculpture From the Sea. The concept behind the sculpture was the sermon that King delivered on May 17, 1956, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. Entitled, “The Death of Evil upon the Seashore,” King’s speech commemorated the second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s school desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.

 

Early in his sermon, King observed that while “the whole history of life is the history of a struggle between good and evil,” good ultimately triumphs. He expounded upon the Biblical story of Moses parting the Red Sea. Through God’s intercession, with the armies of the Pharaoh in pursuit, Moses parted the waters and led the people of Israel across the seabed to safety on the opposite bank. Afterward, the waves of the Red Sea crashed upon and drowned the Pharaoh’s army.

 

Hunt created From the Sea to sculpturally evoke the divine justice detailed in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s sermon. 

1984

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Slowly Toward the North, a sculpture on view in Crystal Bridges’ North Forest, commemorates the Great Migration, the large movement of Black Americans from the rural South to cities in the North from 1918-1970.

 

The work combines two symbolically significant forms: a train and a push plow. The train form emerges from the steam locomotive’s driving wheels and front-end cowcatcher whose components present themselves prominently in the work. Viewed from the opposing side, the work recalls the forms of stylized handles, handlebars, plowshare and wheel of a push plow cultivator used by Hunt in the South when visiting family. The two primary elements point in opposite directions; the locomotive faces north, an allusion to the mode of transportation that brought many Black southerners to the industrial North. The plow points toward the agrarian South, representing the human labor (rather than animal or machines) used to till the earth.

1987

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"Hunt was tasked with designing a sculpture to memorialize the Middle Passage, the most brutal leg of a three-voyage trade that carried enslaved Africans to the Americas. In the first leg of the journey, European merchants sailed to Africa laden with goods: firearms, gunpowder, glass beads, brass, wool, and other cargo. These were traded for enslaved African men, women, and children who had been forcibly abducted from their inland homes to ports along the west and central west African coasts. From there, they were loaded onto ships to make the transatlantic voyage under horrific conditions. Upon arrival in the Americas, the Africans were sold in exchange for New World commodities such as sugar, tobacco, and cotton, which the slave dealers carried back to Europe on the third and final segment of the trade.

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Hunt was most profoundly influenced by 'Middle Passage,' a poem composed by friend and poet laureate Robert Hayden who characterized the Middle Passage as a 'voyage through death to life upon these shores.'

 

Hunt realized Hayden’s 'voyage through death' as a journey walking up an incline towards and through the door of no return and into the cavernous belly of a slave ship, its hull split in two and listing at a perilous angle as if run aground or about to sink. For Hunt, 'the sculpture reflects the dark and tragic experience of the people kidnapped from their homes, but the symbolic ship prow is broken open to the sky, suggesting future freedom.' The model [pictured here] commissioned has yet to become a fully realized monument."

 

- excerpt from Richard Hunt: Monumental, 2023

1989

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"This public monument was created as a historical marker honoring African American educator Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955) located blocks from her D.C. home. She was a co-founder of the NAACP, and a civil and women’s rights leader critical to these movements. Bethune was a hero of Hunt’s mother and one of the key figures that Hunt was taught to revere as a child.

 

Encompassing a visual expression of the long post-slavery struggle to secure an education for African Americans, From the Ground Up is an embodiment of education and freedom. Being armed with education and finding pride in being Black were critical elements of freedom referenced in Bethune’s famous quote, 'If our people are to fight their way up out of bondage we must arm them with the sword and the shield and the buckler of pride.' Bethune’s sword, powerfully and gracefully executed in bronze, may be seen soaring high in the air extended above the sculpture representing the pride of African Americans fighting for education and freedom. The title recalls Bethune’s focus on building schools ‘from the ground up’ including what would eventually become Bethune-Cookman University, a historically Black university in Daytona Beach, Florida."

 

- excerpt from Richard Hunt: Monumental, 2023

1991-96

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"Flintlock Fantasy or The Promise of Force is the most visually aggressive and viscerally threatening composition of Hunt’s career. Weighing 700 pounds and standing more than seven feet in height, this machine of destruction appears to unleash a barrage of weaponry–suggestive of spears, rocket launchers, and surface-to-air missiles. Hunt began developing this piece in response to the massive air and ground offensive unleashed against Iraq on January 16, 1991, marking the start of the Persian Gulf War.

 

Hunt worked on this sculpture intermittently over the course of five years. The primary form is the hammer of a flintlock firearm. In the 18th century, flintlocks produced in Europe and specifically manufactured to trade for enslaved Africans, flooded the continent of Africa. The importation of flintlock muskets during this time has been identified as 'the most important technical change in West Africa in slave gathering.' Flintlock Fantasy or The Promise of Force serves as a memorial to the gun-slave cycle and underscores the role of gunpowder technology in growing the transatlantic slave trade and transforming African economies.

 

Flintlock Fantasy or The Promise of Force is a meditation on endless cycles of war. Hunt explained, 'Abstract art can communicate beauty as well as a message. Look at Picasso’s strong statement against war with Guernica.' Flintlock Fantasy or The Promise of Force is Hunt's most powerful statement against violence, war, and slavery."

 

- excerpt from Richard Hunt: Monumental, 2023

2002

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"Hunt has referred to Tower of Aspiration and And They Went Down Both into the Water as 'site- and subject-specific.' These public sculptures evoke the lives, deeds, and hopes of the community of Black men and women that lived and worshiped along the Savannah River, just two blocks away from the sculptures’ installation site in Augusta, Georgia’s Springfield Village Park. 

 

Tower of Aspiration reaches to the sky. Vertical elements gather into stacked units that appear provisional yet stable. Nearly two-thirds of the way to the tower’s top, it expands into the structure of a twisted ladder, a visual motif that has appeared in Hunt’s works since the 1970s. Whereas Tower of Aspiration is open, And They Went Down Both into the Water is compact. It reads almost bodily, as though a figure in a crouch, wading in a pool of water.

 

Augusta’s tourism board partnered with the nonprofit Springfield Village Park Foundation to develop a 2.5-acre civic park around one of the city’s under recognized landmarks: a nineteenth-century timber building that housed the Springfield Baptist Church, a free Black settlement in the early years of the nation and one of the oldest Black congregations in the country. The $6 million park, funded through city, state, and private contributions, opened in 2002 with Hunt’s stainless-steel Tower of Aspiration standing on the upper terrace of a two-tier plaza." 

- excerpt from Richard Hunt: Monumental, 2023​​​

2006

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And They Went Down Both into the Water assumes its place as the sister piece to Tower of Aspiration in Springfield Village Park in Augusta, Georgia, across from the historic Springfield Baptist Church. Constructed in 1897, the church is home to the oldest independent African American congregation in the country. The work is inspired by the biblical story of the Ethiopian baptism (Acts 8:27–39), which underscores the ability of Black believers to participate in salvation.

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"Whereas Tower of Aspiration is open, And They Went Down Both into the Water is compact. It reads almost bodily, as though a figure in a crouch, wading in a pool of water." (excerpt from Richard Hunt: Monumental, 2023)

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And They Went Down Both into the Water  was installed several years after Tower of Aspiration.

2013

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Like much of Hunt’s public work, the meaning of Steel Garden was informed by the site it was commissioned for and by the organization that commissioned it. United States Steel Corp. commissioned Steel Garden to mark the entrance to a now abandoned development on the former industrial site in Chicago. Steel mills once dominated the site stretching from 79th to 92nd St. along Lake Michigan on the South Side. The steel mill represented to Hunt the promise of employment and opportunity that drew so many Black workers to industrial jobs in Chicago during the Great Migration.

 

Steel Garden alludes to the growth of a people propelled by a move away from the Jim Crow South toward independence, civil liberties, and freedom. It manifests as a beacon to the six million Black people who left the American South for a greater chance of freedom in Northern, Midwestern, and Western states. Like a lit torch, Steel Garden memorializes the steel mills of Chicago that provided jobs for a newly emerging Black middle class and helped light the way to economic opportunity. 

2016

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Richard Hunt's Swing Low, a monumental welded-bronze sculpture, is installed as the centerpiece of the Central Hall of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 

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Hunt sees the arc segments in this hanging piece as a reference to the “swinging motion and wing-like forms” of the “band of angels,” made famous in the beloved Negro spiritual, "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot."

 

According to Hunt, the piece pays homage to Negro spirituals, and “their defining place in early colored religious, social and cultural self-consciousness.”

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- Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture

2021

 

The Light of Truth Ida B. Wells National Monument is a bronze and marble public sculpture located in the Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. The sculpture takes its name from a quote by civil rights activist and investigative journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931): "The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them." It was unveiled in 2021 by the Ida B. Wells Commemorative Art Committee.

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A feature documentary produced by Rana Segal and Laurie Little weave together the process of the creation of the monument of Ida B. Wells with her history and Richard Hunt’s history. Learn more...

2023

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To be installed in 2026

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The Obama Foundation has commissioned a sculpture, Book Bird, for the Obama Presidential Center and Library on the South Side of Chicago. Hunt’s sculpture will be placed in the Library Reading Garden outside of the new Chicago Public Library branch on the Obama Presidential Center campus. Book Bird depicts a bird taking flight from a book to illuminate how reading and learning allows readers to enter new places and fly free. 

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Fittingly, the design for Book Bird is based on the Book Bird Award that Hunt had created for the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) to recognize leaders in the community who demonstrate their commitment to the UNCF through extraordinary philanthropy and volunteer service. Learn more...

Forthcoming​

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One of the last public sculptures Hunt designed will be placed near the home of Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley and her son Emmett Till in West Woodlawn, Chicago. The house was dilapidated when purchased in 2020 by Blacks in Green, an environmental and economic justice nonprofit. The organization has developed restoration plans that will include a museum and cultural hub.

 

Hunt’s contribution to the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley House Museum is Hero Ascending, a soaring fifteen-foot-tall monument. The cast bronze maquette of Hero

Ascending (shown here) rises out of an angular base and transforms into organic forms reaching out and up. Hunt’s design evokes a bird the moment it is about to take flight, like a spirit ascending to the heavens.

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Hero Ascending will commemorate Till and the tragic event that gave rise to the modern Civil Rights Movement and to the formative shaping of Richard Hunt's career.

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