page_title: Richard Hunt (sculptor)
section_title: Early life and education
hierarchical_section_title: Richard Hunt (sculptor) / Early life and education
caption_attribution_description: English: Winged Man sculpture by Richard Hunt 1987, Chicago
context_page_description: Richard Howard Hunt is an American sculptor with over 125 sculptures for public display in the United States. Hunt has served on the Smithsonian Institution's National Board of Directors. Hunt’s abstract, contemporary sculpture work is notable for its presence in public displays as early as the 1960s, despite social pressures for the obstruction of African-American art at the time.
context_section_description: He was born in 1935 on Chicago's South Side. Hunt and his younger sister Marian grew up in South Side Chicago, but moved to Galesburg, Illinois at eleven years old where he spent majority of his time in the city of Chicago. From an early age he was interested in the arts, as his mother, an artist and librarian, would bring him to performances by local opera companies that sang classical repertoires of Mozart, Rossini, Verdi, and Handel. As a young boy, Hunt began to show enthusiasm and talent in artistic disciplines such as drawing and painting, and also sculpture, an interest that grew more and more as he got older. Hunt was inspired to pursue his career in the arts because his family appreciated art and he clearly said "My mom was supportive and dad was tolerant." In the seventh grade, Hunt attended the Junior School of Art Institute of Chicago where he began his interest in art. Hunt also acquired business sense and awareness of social issues from working for his father in a barbershop.
  As a teenager, Hunt began his work in sculpture, working in clay and carvings. While his work started in a makeshift studio in his 1950 bedroom, he eventually built a basement studio in his father's barbershop. Hunt not only embraced the medium of metal and the techniques of sculpting, but studied non-art subjects at University of Chicago and University of Illinois before entering the Art Institute of Chicago. The non-art subjects that Hunt first work with were objects he found. He was once interested in Surrealism where he experiment with the assemblage of broken machine parts and metals from the junkyard such as car bumpers and reshaping them into organic forms. Hunt worked with materials of copper, iron and then to steel and aluminum which led to him to produce a series of "hybrid figures" which where reference to human, animal and plant forms. This where Hunt attains a combination of organic and industrial subject matter in his artwork. Hunt studied at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1953 to 1957, focusing on welding sculptures, but also studying lithography.  His earliest works were more figural than his later ones, and usually represented classical themes.  Hunt began exhibiting his sculptures nationwide while still a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As a Junior, his piece “Arachne,” was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He received a B.A.E. from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1957. Upon graduating, Hunt was awarded the James Nelson Raymond Foreign Travel Fellowship and continued his studies in England, France, Italy, and Spain. His time abroad solidified his belief that metal was the definitive medium of the twentieth century. Upon returning from his studies abroad, Hunt served in the United States Army from 1958 to 1960. He became the youngest exhibiting artist at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair.
caption: Winged Man sculpture by Richard Hunt in Chicago, IL, 1987
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