Martin Puryear

Contemporary artist Martin Puryear (born 1941) creates large-scale abstract sculptures that call to mind familiar motifs and objects. Created most often of wood, Puryear’s monumental forms sometimes suggest wheels, baskets, walls, gates, towers, vessels, and shelters. At other times, the irregular shapes and bulging volumes demonstrate the artist’s interest in pure form. As Puryear says, “I value the referential quality of art, the fact that a work can allude to things or states of being without in any way representing them.” [1]

Although he is sometimes referred to as a post-minimalist, Puryear began making art in a representational vein. He notes that he had to “work his way through” to abstraction. [2] Born into a middle class African American family in Washington, DC, Puryear expressed an interest in art from an early age, taking art classes and visiting the Smithsonian museums. He also demonstrated a talent for craft, making guitars, boats, and furniture by hand. His first love, however, was science and natural history. He combined his interests by doing detailed illustrations of natural specimens. He entered Catholic University in 1958 intending to study biology but eventually changed his major to art. During college, he exhibited some paintings and woodcuts in group shows in Washington galleries.

Following graduation, Puryear entered the Peace Corps and spent two years in Sierra Leone. There, in addition to teaching, he found time to observe area craftsmen and found particular inspiration in the work of local woodworkers. From them, he says, he learned old world joinery. [3] At the end of his stint in the Peace Corps, he traveled to Sweden to study printmaking at the Swedish Royal Academy of Art. During the day, he created etchings in the printmaking studio, but he found himself increasingly drawn to three-dimensional work and began spending his evenings in the sculpture studio. In Stockholm, he also discovered the work of furniture maker James Krenov, who permitted the young artist to observe him in his workshop.

Puryear returned to the United States in 1968, entering the Master of Fine Arts program in sculpture at Yale University the following year. At Yale, he had the opportunity to work with visiting artists Richard Serra and Robert Morris. Upon graduation, Puryear taught for a time at the historically black Fiske University in Nashville, then moved to New York. He found a studio in Brooklyn and began steadily producing new work. He preferred natural materials such as rawhide, rope, and, with more and more frequency, wood. Having been naturally drawn to traditional craft methods since his youth, and having studied those methods in Africa and Sweden, he began applying them in the production of fine art sculpture.

Puryear’s work began to attract attention; he had his first solo show in an American gallery in 1972. He started teaching at the University of Maryland in College Park, commuting from New York, in 1974. In 1977, however, the artist experienced a devastating setback when a fire in his studio destroyed most of his work. Needing a fresh start, Puryear moved to Chicago, where he attempted to recover from his loss and began to create new work. To support himself, he took a teaching position at the University of Illinois, Circle Campus. His work became increasingly monumental in scale, and he began taking commissions for large outdoor sculptures. He had his first solo museum exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in his native Washington in 1977.

The 1970s and 1980s saw the artist experimenting with bold forms and inventive materials. In addition to wood, the artist worked with wire, mesh, tar, and stone. Solid masses contrast with delicate hoops of wood, wall sculptures with freestanding floor pieces. In Sanctuary, 1982, Art Institute of Chicago, a hollow wooden cube balances precariously on two slender branches which are attached to a single wooden wheel. Old Mole, 1985, Philadelphia Museum of Art, demonstrates the artist’s “basket weaving” technique on a large scale, with interwoven red cedar slats forming a cylindrical shape that comes to a slanting point. Sanctum, 1985, Whitney Museum of American Art, is a hulking yurt-like form created from wire mesh and tar. The basket and shelter forms in his work recall the artist’s time in Sierra Leone.

This period also brought him increased recognition. He had two pieces included in the 1981 Whitney Biennial; in 1984, the University Gallery at the University of Massachusetts Amherst mounted a ten-year retrospective of his work. David McKee Gallery gave him his first solo New York gallery show in 1987. His breakthrough came in 1989 when he represented the United States at the Bienal de São Paulo, where he won the grand prize; that same year, he won the “genius grant” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Demonstrating an interest in his African American heritage, the artist has over the years created a number of works that pay tribute to significant historic African American figures. Some Lines for Jim Beckwourth, 1978, collection of the artist, is a wall construction comprising a series of rawhide strips mounted horizontally. Tufts of fur and hair make rhythmic points throughout the composition, which Puryear created as a tribute to the nineteenth-century mixed race explorer and guide Jim Beckwourth. Ladder for Booker T. Washington, 1996, Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, is a towering ladder created from thin saplings that narrows at the top, perhaps referencing the towering accomplishments Washington achieved. C.F.A.O., 2006–2007, collection of the artist and Donald Young Gallery, refers to the Compagnie Française de l’Afrique Occidentale, a nineteenth-century French trading company that operated between the southern coast of France and West Africa. [4]

In 1990, the artist left Chicago for upstate New York, just as the Art Institute of Chicago began plans for a major exhibition of his work. The exhibition opened in 1991, traveling to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. An exhibition organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts traveled in 2001 and 2002.

Recent honors have included the Skowhegan Medal for sculpture, an honorary doctorate from Yale University, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which awarded him their Gold Medal for Sculpture in 2007. That same year, the Museum of Modern Art organized the most comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work to date. In 2006, the artist completed construction on a house and studio in the Hudson Valley, where he continues to live and work.

Notes:

[1] Puryear quoted in exhibition brochure Martin Puryear, Museum of Modern Art, November 4, 2007–January 14, 2008 (2007), 1.

[2] John Elderfield, Martin Puryear Exhibition catalogue. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007), 168.

[3] Elderfield, Martin Puryear, 169.

[4] Puryear quoted in exhibition brochure Martin Puryear, 9.