Richard Hunt, sculptor who transformed public space, dies at the age of 88

Richard Hunt, a prolific sculptor whose towering metalwork became a mainstay of American public art and whose 70-year career captured the attention of presidents from Lyndon B. Johnson to Barack Obama, died Saturday at his home in Chicago. He was 88.

The death was confirmed by Mr Hunt’s studio and by his biographer Jon Ott. A cause was not released.

Mr. Hunt, a son of Chicago’s South Side, was 19 years old in 1955 when he attended the open-casket funeral of Emmett Till, a young black Chicagoan who grew up near Mr. Hunt and who was tortured and murdered during a visit to Mississippi. That searing experience helped shape the artist’s career and encouraged him to experiment with welding and forging discarded materials into art.

His work received early acclaim. Two years after Emmett’s funeral, while Mr. Hunt was still a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art purchased one of his sculptures, a steelwork called “Arachne.” In 1964, Mr. Hunt became a visiting artist at Yale. In 1968, President Johnson appointed him to the National Council on the Arts. And in 1971, when he was 35 years old, the Museum of Modern Art showed dozens of Mr. Hunt’s works in a retrospective.

In an assessment of Mr. Hunt’s art that year, The Times reported that “there are really very few American sculptors of Mr. Hunt’s generation who produced a comparable body of work so early in their development.” But because he was based in Chicago and not New York, “his reputation here has remained that of an outsider,” the 1971 article said.

Mr. Hunt’s sculptures blended classical techniques honed at Chicago’s Art Institute, where he began taking classes as a child, with self-taught soldering and welding. Using unusual methods for the time, he would scrounge alleys for scrap metal or pick up broken parts left over from car accidents to use in his art.

He was quoted as saying: “Sculpture is not a self-declaration, but a voice of and for my people – all in all a rich fabric; underneath it all, the dynamism of the African American people.”

Over the decades, Mr. Hunt became known for his impressive public works of art, more than 160 of which have been exhibited across the country, according to his studio. This includes “Swing low,” a 1,500-pound work of welded bronze that hangs from a ceiling at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, and “Flight Forms,” an imposing work of welded stainless steel outside Chicago’s Midway International Airport. Mr. Hunt’s other works have been installed in locations as diverse as a sculpture garden in Kansas, a museum in Kentucky and a playhouse in Michigan.

A recently completed work depicting a bird flying out of a book will be exhibited at the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago when that building opens. Mr. Obama has done that called Mr. Hunt “one of the greatest artists Chicago has ever produced.” The city’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, said in a statement that the sculptor made an “indelible impact on our city and our world.”

Richard Howard Hunt was born on September 12, 1935 in Chicago, the first of two children of Cleophus Howard Hunt, a hairdresser, and Etoria Inez Henderson Hunt, a librarian. He became interested in art at an early age and often visited the museums of Chicago, where he became fascinated by works from Africa. As a young teenager, he began taking classes at the Junior School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Mr Hunt is survived by his daughter, Cecilia, an artist, and his sister, Marian, a retired librarian.

Mr Hunt is quoted as saying that his attendance at the Till funeral almost seventy years ago helped set the course for his career. Like Emmett, Mr. Hunt was a black teenager from Chicago who sometimes traveled south to visit relatives. The artist said that what happened to Emmett “could have happened to me.”

“That really set the tone for his entire artistic life, which really focused on representing freedom, and freedom in every sense,” said Mr. Ott, the biographer.

Even as his work attracted the attention of art collectors and political leaders, Mr. Hunt spent much of his adult life sleeping on a mattress on the floor of his Chicago studio, which had no television, few amenities and enormous piles of scrap metal with which he and his colleagues would build.

The studio building, which he acquired in 1971, fits into a tree-lined streetscape in an affluent part of Chicago’s North Side. But inside, the high-ceilinged space, which had once been a substation to power the city’s elevated rail lines, is a living museum.

In addition to half-built sculptures and mementos of his career, Mr. Hunt had continued to work well into this year, supervising other sculptors who executed his vision of public art installations. One of his last pieces, Mr. Ott said, was a sculptural model for a monument to Emmett Till.

The plan, Mr. Ott said, is for other sculptors who worked with Mr. Hunt to complete a large-scale version of that piece, which will eventually be displayed outside Emmett’s childhood home, just two blocks from where Mr. Hunt was born.