On View

© 2024 The Richard Hunt Trust / Artists Rights Society, New York. Photos Courtesy of The Cleveland Museum of Art

Currents and Constellations: Black Art in Focus  puts art from the CMA’s permanent collection in conversation with a vanguard of emerging and midcareer Black artists, as each explores the fundaments of art making, embracing and challenging art history. The connections between the artworks and the themes in this exhibition are best described both as currents, which are more predictable and easier to trace, and as constellations, which are less predictable and more difficult to follow. Intimate in scale, yet broad in scope, Currents and Constellations illuminates singular works created by Black artists working in the United States to broaden visitors’ sense of Black artistic production.

© 2024 The Richard Hunt Trust / Artists Rights Society, New York

Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of Richard Hunt

Chicago sculptor Richard Hunt is an acclaimed artist with major commissions on view across the United States. He 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 the artist, the piece pays homage to Negro spirituals, and “their defining place in early colored religious, social and cultural self-consciousness.”

© 2024 The Richard Hunt Trust / Artists Rights Society, New York. Photo Courtesy of the Indianapolis Museum of Art

Richard Hunt's Linear Spatial Theme, Number 2, 1962 has been on view at the Indianapolis Museum of Art since 2018. In addition, the museum acquired Standing Form, 1961 in 2022. A close look at Standing Form reveals the bolts and other scrap Hunt incorporated into this work, elevating detritus to the level of fine art. Considered the foremost African American abstract sculptor, Hunt is known for works that incorporate unconventional media and allude to plant, human, and animal forms. A pioneer of welded sculpture along with Indiana native David Smith (whose work can be seen in the adjacent American galleries), Hunt scoured automobile junkyards for materials during the 1960s and transformed cast off automobile bumpers and fenders into elegant three dimensional compositions.

© 2024 The Richard Hunt Trust / Artists Rights Society, New York, Photo: Nathan Keay. Installation photos courtesy of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Slowly Toward the North (1984), a sculpture now 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.