Martin Puryear
| Martin Puryear | |
| Born | 1941 Washington D.C. |
| Nationality | American |
| Field | Sculpture |
Martin Puryear (born May 23, 1941) is an African American sculptor. He is considered one of the foremost sculptors of the present day, and the leading African American sculptor. He works in media such as wood, stone, tar, and wire, and his work is a union of minimalism and traditional crafts.
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Life
He was born in Washington, D.C., and he spent his youth studying practical crafts, learning how to build guitars and furniture. He received a B.A. from The Catholic University of America in 1963 and was a Peace Corps volunteer in Sierra Leone from 1964 to 1966. In the late 1960s he studied printmaking in Sweden and assisted a master cabinet-maker. He entered the Yale University graduate sculpture program in 1968.
His first solo exhibition was held in the late 1970s at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. In the 1980s he participated in two Whitney Biennials and received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1989.
In 2003, he served on the Jury for the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition.
The Museum of Modern Art presented a 30-year survey of Puryear’s work in 2007. The retrospective opens at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on November 8, 2008. SFMOMA’s presentation “includes a special installation in the Haas Atrium including Ladder for Booker T. Washington (1996), made from a 36-foot-long split sapling, and Ad Astra (2007), a 63-foot-tall work that rises to the museum’s fifth-floor bridge.” The Haas Atrium work can be viewed without purchasing a museum admission ticket.
Work
Martin Puryear’s work is the product of much thought, assembled in a minimalist, simple design. Two of his main works are Sanctuary and Box and Pole. The latter’s simplicity is evident just by analyzing its simple title. Box and Pole comprises a box on the ground with a hundred foot pole jutting upwards to the sky, therefore symbolizing our position on earth. We are superior to some things (the box), yet inferior to others (God). He is clearly a modern sculptor, but in works such as Sanctuary he uses primitive techniques to create his final work. Sanctuary is basically a stick connecting a box that anchors what is on the other end of the stick, a wheel. The wheel can move, but its movement is restricted, symbolic of human life. His work contributes to society as a whole as it teaches us many moral lessons such as the two mentioned.
His works are held in the collections of the Guggenheim, Museum of Modern Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Walker Art Center, Art Institute of Chicago and Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts.
References
- ^ a b c d e f g Karen O. Janovy, Janice Driesbach, Daniel A. Siedell, Norman A. Geske,David Cateforis, Sculpture from the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska Press, 2006, p239. ISBN 080327629X
- ^ a b Horst Woldemar Janson, Anthony F. Janson, History of Art: The Western Tradition, Prentice Hall, 2004, p882. ISBN 0131828959
- ^ New York Times. “Solo Museum Shows: Not the Usual Suspects” by Roberta Smith. September 9, 2007
- ^ “Martin Puryear at SFMOMA
- ^ guggenheimcollection.org
- ^ moma.org
- ^ corcoran.org
- ^ themodern.org
- ^ collections.walkerart.org
- ^ artic.edu