MoCA Westport's 60s Mod exhibition will showcase iconic works by established artists and submissions from high school artists who interpret the era. One influential featured artist is Richard Hunt. Most people recognize industrial machine imagery as a staple of modern art. Hunt is a pioneer of this phenomenon, perhaps the most crucial pioneer of this modern art aesthetic.
Inspired by modernism and abstract expressionism, Richard Hunt uniquely took to junkyard metals to recreate organic figures in his sculptures beginning in the 1950s. He made several monuments of US civil rights heroes such as Martin Luther King jr, Mary McLeod Bethune, John Jones, Jesse Owens, and Ida B. Wells. He was first exposed to social issues while working in his father's barbershop.
At age 35, he became the first African American to have a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. The MoMA has presented 12 exhibitions of his work.
Some of his most profound works were symbolic of the death of Emmett Till. Like Till, Hunt had been from Chicago and visited family in the south. He attended Emmett Till's funeral, which galvanized the civil rights movement. Despite attending the funeral and growing up near Till, he immersed himself in the subject, filling his home with books as he worked on the sculptures. However, Hunt differentiated himself from artists with an overt racial politic. The public sees his work as "what it is," reflecting a variety of subjects throughout his career.
1968 President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him to the National Council on the Arts. He was the first African American to serve on the National Endowment for the Arts's governing body.
Richard Hunt, a pioneer of modern art whose career spanned 70 years, passed away in December 2023. The 60s mod exhibition at MoCA Westport will feature a lithograph and serigraph of his. The Westport Arts Collection (WPAC) curated this exhibition and has 21 other prints by Richard Hunt related to his three-dimensional sculptures. Hunt described his inspiration as something that "comes forward to me as I'm working on it." Come to MoCA Westport to see some of his influential works in person!
