Richard Hunt

Early life

Richard Hunt was born in 1935 on Chicago's South Side and raised in the Woodlawn and Englewood neighborhoods. Hunt and his younger sister, Marian, grew up with their parents, Cleophus Howard Hunt, a barber, and Etoria Inez Henderson Hunt, a librarian and beautician. The Hunts were descendants of enslaved people brought from West Africa through the Port of Savannah, and often visited extended family in Georgia. Although he moved to Galesburg, Illinois at eleven years old, he spent the majority of his time in the city of Chicago. From an early age he was interested in the arts. Accompanying his mother, a beautician and librarian, he attended 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 for drawing, painting, and sculpting, interests that he increasingly developed. Inspired to pursue his career in the arts, he stated "My mom was supportive and dad was tolerant." Hunt also acquired business sense and awareness of social issues from working in his father's barbershop.

As a teenager, Hunt began his work in sculpture, working with clay, carving wood, and modeling Sculpt-Metal. While his work started in a makeshift studio in his 1940s bedroom, he eventually built a basement studio in his father's barbershop and later a basement studio in the family's Englewood home.

Education

Beginning in the eighth grade at age 13, Hunt took classes at the Art Institute of Chicago's Junior School of the Arts. He graduated early from Englewood High School in January 1953 and entered the School of the Art Institute of Chicago later that year, and graduated in 1957. He also took classes at the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago.

While studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Hunt focused his sculptural work on creating soldered wire figures, then on welding sculptures, as well as producing drawings, paintings, and lithographs. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago did not have classes or materials suitable for learning welding, so he purchased his own welding equipment in 1955, and with little instruction, taught himself to weld in the basement studio of his father’s barbershop. Interested in Modernism, Abstract Expressionism, and Surrealism, he experimented with the assemblage of broken machine parts, car bumpers, and metals from the junkyard reshaping them into organic forms. Hunt went on to work with iron, steel, copper, and aluminum producing a series of "hybrid figures", references to human, animal, and plant forms. Hunt explored the interplay of organic and industrial subject matter in his artwork. His earliest works, which often represented classical themes, are more figurative than his later works.

Hunt began exhibiting his sculptures nationwide while still a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1957 as a senior, his piece Arachne (1956) was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He received a bachelor's of arts in education (BAE) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago that same year.

Notable degrees

In addition to his studies, Hunt received eighteen honorary degrees from universities all over the country. Some of which include the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL), Northwestern University (Evanston, IL), Tufts University (Medford, MA), and the University of Notre Dame (Notre Dame, IN).

European travel

Upon graduating, Hunt was awarded the James Nelson Raymond Foreign Travel Fellowship. He sailed to England on the SS United States and then to Paris, where he leased a car, a Citroën 2CV, to travel to Spain, Italy, and eventually back to Paris. He spent most of his time in Florence, where he learned to cast his first sculptures in bronze, at the renowned Marinelli foundry. His time abroad solidified his belief that metal was the definitive medium of the twentieth century.

Military service

Hunt served in the United States Army from 1958 to 1960. He took basic training at Fort Leonard Wood. Hunt served as an illustrator for Brooke Army Medical Center.

Desegregation activism

On March 7, 1960, Mary Andrews, president of the local youth council of the NAACP, wrote letters to store managers in downtown San Antonio, Texas, who operated white-only lunch counters. Encouraged by the growing sit-in movement, she requested equal services be provided to all, regardless of race. Hunt in U.S. Army uniform went to lunch at Woolworth's on March 16, 1960. Seated at the counter, his order was taken, and he was served without incident. Hunt, the only known African American to eat at San Antonio's Woolworth's lunch counter that day, fulfilled Mary Andrews's vision of integration. This action, along with a handful of other African Americans at other lunch counters across the city, made San Antonio the first peaceful and voluntary lunch counter integration in the south.

Teaching

After completing his military service, Hunt was invited to teach a class in metal design by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago during the 1960-1961 academic year. He also taught sculpture, drawing, and metalworking at the University of Illinois branch at Navy pier for two years. In 1962, Hunt was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for Creative Sculpture, which enabled him to stop teaching and become a full-time sculptor.

Influences

Hunt began to experiment with materials and sculpting techniques, influenced heavily by progressive twentieth-century artists. At the age of 17, Hunt was inspired to focus on sculpture after visiting the exhibition, Sculpture of the Twentieth Century, which was held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1953. The Sculpture of the Twentieth Century included works of Pablo Picasso, Julio González, David Smith, Constantin Brancusi, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Alberto Giacometti, Umberto Boccioni, and Jean Arp. At the exhibition, Hunt for the first time saw various artworks of welded metal. Hunt was also inspired and paid respect to French sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon whose 1914 bronze "Horse" was instructional. Seeing these artists' works led Hunt to teach himself how to solder wire to create small figures. He would later go on to create both figurative and abstract shapes by learning to weld metal in 1955. Hunt also focused on linear-spatial arrangement of his materials where he followed Julio González's footsteps into three-dimensional structures.

Career

From 1955 through the 1970s, Hunt used scrap yards as his quarries and transformed salvaged metal into abstract, welded sculptures. Early works such as Hero’s Head (1956), Arachne (1956), Steel Bloom, Number 10 (1956), and Hero Construction (1958) set the foundation for Hunt’s exploration of various sculptural forms; and his merging of anthropomorphic, biomorphic, and metamorphic elements into single works of art. These early sculptures were followed by a series of welded metal compositions with a calligraphic style that experimented with linear space. Following the influence of Julio González, Hunt’s “drawing in space” sculptures pushed the limits of metals’ tensile strength to create delicate and expansive linear forms. In the early 1960s, Hunt began to explore enclosed forms with a focus on incorporating rounded, organic shapes and axial geometry.

Hunt’s frequent experimentation garnered critically positive response from the art community, such that Hunt was exhibited at several of the Artists of Chicago and Vicinity Shows and the American Show, where the Museum of Modern Art purchased Arachne (1956) for its collection. He was the youngest artist to exhibit at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair, a major international survey exhibition of modern art.

Hunt received his first sculpture commission from the State of Illinois Public Art Program in 1967. In 1969, he finished the commission, resulting in a public artwork named Play. This was the start of Hunt’s use of Cor-Ten steel as a material, which was inspired by Picasso’s use of the same material in his large work (The Picasso) in Daley Plaza, Chicago. Hunt’s Play stands in the John J. Madden Health Center in Maywood, Illinois.

In 1971, Hunt acquired a deactivated electrical substation near northern Chicago and repurposed it into a metal welding sculpture studio. The station came equipped with a bridge crane, which was convenient for moving large sculpture pieces, and a spacious 40-foot (12 m) ceiling. While handling the metal, Hunt worked with two assistants. Hunt described metalworks as "free play of forms evolving, developing and contrasting with one another."

Seeking a more direct connection with nature, Hunt bought a farmhouse on 26 acres in McHenry County, Illinois, in 1974, while continuing to maintain his Lill Avenue studio in Chicago. He also purchased a satellite studio in Benton Harbor, Michigan in 1995 as part of an initiative to revitalize the community. This Richard Hunt Studio Center was gifted to the Krasl Art Center in August 2023.

Notable works of art

Early period (1953–1975)

In 1955, Hunt attended the funeral of Emmett Till at the Roberts Temple Church in Chicago. The open-casket funeral showed Till's face, mutilated and disfigured from having been lynched. This experience had a profound impact on Hunt. Till had grown up in Woodlawn only a few blocks from the home where Hunt was born. Hunt, like Till, traveled South to visit family.

Hero's Head, a solemn representation of the disfigured head of Till, was one of the first welded sculptures that Hunt created. He witnessed Till's funeral and taught himself how to weld the very same summer. On January 6, 2003, Hunt also attended Mamie Till's funeral out of reverence for what she did for her child and for the Civil Rights Movement as a whole. The hollow, almost skull-like form of Hero’s Head evokes strong feelings of horror and sorrow.

Curator and historian of African American art, LeRonn P. Brooks writes that "Hero's Head is both an exposition of racism's deadly ends and a critique of the American racial order. It also brings anachronistic and mythological themes often associated with modern abstraction back into the world in the service of civil rights."

Hunt salvaged everyday materials, including a car muffler and two lampshades, and transformed these odds and ends into a sculpture he called Arachne, which is a reference to Ovid’s epic poem, Metamorphoses. The figure in Hunt's metallic sculpture resembles a Kafkaesque hybrid of a human and insect.

Dorothy Miller, who was a groundbreaking curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), saw Arachne in a 1957 exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, and helped to get it acquired and exhibited at MoMA just a few months later. Hunt’s Arachne inspired the poem "Richard Hunt's 'Arachne'" by Robert Earl Hayden.

In February 1957, Richard Hunt participated in the Chicago Artists No-Jury Exhibition at Navy Pier on Lake Michigan. His sculpture, Steel Bloom, Number 10 was included in the show and received the Pauline Palmer Prize. Steel Bloom, Number 10 is part of Hunt’s “Steel Bloom” series, which he created in 1956, shortly after he taught himself how to weld. The welded steel sculpture evokes natural and organic forms.

Middle period (1976–2000)

In 1977, Hunt finished a maquette for a monumental plaza sculpture outside the Social Security Administration building in Richmond, California. Study for Richmond Cycle consists of two distinct parts, a larger biomorphic form and a smaller one. The theme of the sculpture references the cycle of life and the duality between the weight of experience and the lightness and promise of youth.

Richard Wright’s 1940 novel, Native Son, provided inspiration for Hunt’s sculpture Bigger Bridge which references that novel’s protagonist, Bigger Thomas. Composed of welded chromed steel furniture legs and automobile bumpers, the work takes the shape of a bridge-like arc of steel. This sculpture is now in the collection of the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art.

Slowly Toward the North’s abstract form alludes to two distinct forms, the train and push plow. The shape of a steam engine can be discerned via the driving wheels and front-end cowcatcher components. The forms of the steam engine are juxtaposed with stylized handles, plowshare, and wheels of a push plow cultivator. The work is part of Hunt’s “Plow Series,” which he explains, “grew out of my family’s history and childhood experiences on family farms.”

These two major symbolic elements within the large bronze sculpture commemorates the Great Migration. Per Hunt’s instruction, the train elements face north, representing the journey of Black Americans leaving the south for the northern states; while the plow is oriented to the agrarian south, which indicates their laborious work in the fields.

Slowly Toward the North is on view at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s North Forest.

Hunt ties together the organic form in Hybrid Movement. A complex and twisting welded Cor-Ten steel balances on three points. Here, Hunt “captures the implied vitality of animalistic locomotion and the progression of sound through a musical composition.”

Walter O. Evans commissioned Hunt to create Model for a Middle Passage Monument to commemorate the Atlantic slave trade. The “middle passage” was the segment of the Atlantic slave trade that brought newly enslaved Africans to the Americas. The bronze tabletop sculptural model alludes to a large ship-like structure that would serve as a public work commemorating the slave passage from Africa, and is inspired by the 1962 poem “Middle Passage” by Robert Hayden.

Late period (2001–2023)

Hunt pays homage to his African ancestry and personal trips to Egypt in his sculpture, Nile Journey, which is in the collection of the Brauer Museum of Art, Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana. Nile Journey undulates with currents of bronze in a swirling and wayward fashion in reference to an ancient journey on the Nile, and “gives the impression of a subtly moving tree of gold, befitting the tomb of any pharaoh."

Exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021-22, Rampant Heraldry was fashioned after decorative water pitchers from the Middle Ages called aquamaniles, demonstrating the wide array of subject matter and influences covered by Hunt’s work.

Out and Further Out represents Hunt’s artistic aspiration to push the limits of gravity and material, extending the bronze tendril-like forms horizontally reaching out from a solid columnar base. Hunt described his inspiration for this piece: “I liked the idea of creating this extension rather than having to grow up from the base more vertically. And as a piece that was more improvisational when I started, I was going to have it go out, and I decided I will go further out. I had to do that and gave it that title.”

Planar and Tubular represents Hunt’s concept of organic and industrial hybridization in a monumental form, with its hard angular edges on a stacked double trapezoid base transforming into curvilinear, upward-reaching forms created from industrial ducts. Upon installation of the sculpture on the terrace of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020 for an exhibition, Hunt “mounted a ladder in theatrical fashion and began sanding and polishing the work in rhythmic, circular motions for a live audience in what could have been billed as a sculptural ‘performance.’”

In 2014, Hunt began to create a monumental bronze sculpture, inspired by the forms of scholar’s rocks (gongshi) and the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial in Washington, DC. The piece took six years to complete. It was constructed from large scraps of crumpled bronze material that he received from Revere Copper & Brass.

The three-part title is derived from the formal and figurative elements of the sculpture. Hunt’s travels to China, where he was fascinated by gardens containing gongshi, or scholar’s rocks, influenced the piece’s organic shape. Stone of Hope is the title of the Martin Luther King Jr. sculpture carved in granite by sculptor Lei Yixin. A “love of bronze” is a reference to the actual bronze material used in this particular work of art. Hunt explained that “the Love of Bronze is something that came to mind because on one of those crumpled pieces of metal that I got, the person at Revere had written, ‘Love you, 655.’”

Public art and monuments

Hunt completed more public sculptures than any other sculptor in the country. He also created monuments for some of the United States' greatest heroes, including Martin Luther King Jr., Mary McLeod Bethune, John Jones, Jesse Owens, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Hobart Taylor Jr.

Hunt received his first sculpture commission in 1967 known as Play, which was commissioned by the State of Illinois Public Art Program for the John J. Madden Health Center in Maywood, Illinois. Hunt created Play using Cor-Ten steel. This was the first time he used that specific material to create a sculpture. The making of Play led to Hunt receiving many other public commissions, an undertaking that he considered to be his second career.

Play was originally titled The Chase, and is based on the myth of Diana and Actaeon from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Hunt also noted that imagery from 1963, of police dogs chasing civil rights activists in Birmingham, Alabama motivated him to create the sculpture. Hunt completed Play in 1969.

In 1969, Hunt completed a sculpture to honor the abolitionist John Jones, who was the first African American elected to public office in the state of Illinois.

The sculpture’s form combines geometric abstraction and representational figuration. Hunt explained that he “used the form like a block growing out of his foot to show the weight he had to bear as a Negro as he climbed. And the other block growing out of his shoulder to show how his burden held him down at the same time he was trying to climb.”

John Jones was initially installed on the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. It is currently in the collection of the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center in Chicago.

Harlem Hybrid is in contrast with the mode of minimalist sculpture that prevailed at the time of its creation. The sculpture’s organic shape and form suggests what Hunt describes as the “synthesis of organic and industrial subject matter.”

Works on Paper

In addition to his sculpture, Hunt made a large number of drawings, paintings, lithographs, and screen prints throughout his career. One lithograph, Prometheus (1956) was made around the same time that he completed his Hero’s Head sculpture. Like the sculpture, the theme of Prometheus was spurred on by Emmet Till’s lynching. The Greek myth of Prometheus, who brought civilization to humans by stealing fire from the gods, leading to him being eternally condemned by Zeus, is a metaphor for Till’s suffering at the hands of white supremacy.

In 1965, Hunt was a resident artist at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, where he worked with master printer Kenneth Tyler, and produced a series of 8 lithographs which he titled Details.

Many of Hunt’s works on paper showcase his “unique approach to creating flat, two-dimensional prints that allude to his sculptural processes and interest in surreal-like skeletal structures.”

Awards and accolades

Hunt has received many distinguished honors during his lifetime and posthumously.

Illinois First Lady MK Pritzker proclaimed April 24, 2023 to be “Richard Hunt Day” in Illinois, to celebrate his life's achievements and recognize Hunt as one of the United States’ preeminent sculptors.

Hunt received numerous awards throughout his career, including the Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Logan Medal and Prize, Art Institute of Chicago three times (1956, 1961, and 1962). He received the James N. Raymond Foreign Traveling Fellowship in 1957, which supported his travels to England, France, Spain, and Italy. In 1962, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship; a Tamarind Fellowship (awarded under the auspices of the Ford Foundation) in 1965; a Cassandra Foundation Award in 1970; a James Van Der Zee Lifetime Achievement Award (Brandywine Workshop and Archives) in 1980; an Artists Award from The Studio Museum in Harlem in 1990; a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center in 2009; a Lifetime Achievement Award from Howard University in 2014; an Alain Locke International Art Award, Detroit Institute of Arts in 2015; and the Chicago Public Library Foundation Arts Award and Dorsky Lifetime Achievement Award from the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art in 2023.

In 1998, Hunt became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 1999, he became a member of the National Academy of Design.

In 2014, Hunt was among the first recipients of the Fifth Star Awards, which honor Chicago-based artists whose careers have had a profound impact on the city’s cultural life.

On June 9, 2022, Hunt was honored with the Art Institute of Chicago’s Legends and Legacy Award, and the city of Chicago declared that date as “Richard Hunt Day.”

Exhibitions

Hunt’s work has been displayed in museums and galleries throughout the United States and abroad.

Hunt had his first New York City solo exhibition in 1958 at Alan Gallery, directed by gallerist Charles Alan. The exhibition received a positive review by Dore Ashton in the New York Times, who wrote that “In his carefully finished compositions there is a graceful continuity. Larger volumes are balanced by soaring, tapered lines, or an asymmetrical axis supports the suggestion of radiating forms in transition.” Hunt had subsequent exhibitions at Alan Gallery in 1960 and 1963.

Richard Hunt's first solo show on the west coast was in 1965 at the Felix Landau Gallery in Los Angeles, California. In a review published in Artforum magazine, critic Fidel A. Danieli wrote, “The eye is forced to survey slowly, so controlled and serious are his statements. Empathy is all. Set are the motifs of linear linkage, a tidy concern for detail and appropriate terminating endings, and his blending of mechanical and organic vocabularies.”

Hunt's first solo exhibition in 1962 at B.C. Holland Gallery (formerly Holland-Goldowsky Gallery) in Chicago featured numerous early masterworks that represented his drawing-in-space calligraphic style, as well as his transition into more substantial forms–a change described as “refreshing” by Herbert Pannier in a Chicago Tribune review of the show. Hunt had subsequent solo exhibitions in 1963, 1966, 1968, 1970, and 1976 at B.C. Holland Gallery.

Richard Hunt's first retrospective solo exhibition was held at the Milwaukee Art Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1967. John Lloyd Talor, director of exhibitions and collections at the time,wrote of the show: “Perhaps not since David Smith, with whose work Hunt maintains strong affinity, has a sculptor so successfully handled the problems of form volumetrically within the mass of sculptural space.”

Hunt's work has been exhibited 11 times at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, including a major solo retrospective in 1971, when he was only 35 years old, titled The Sculpture of Richard Hunt (March 25 – July 9, 1971). He was the first African American sculptor to be given a retrospective by MoMA. A photograph of Hunt’s 1956 sculpture Arachne was used for the cover of the exhibition catalogue.

Museum holdings, public collections, and gallery representation

Hunt's artworks are in the collection of major museums across the United States. The Smithsonian has twenty-one of his works, including the large bronze sculpture, Swing Low, which is prominently located, suspended from the ceiling of Heritage Hall in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Other numerous notable museums with holdings of Hunt’s work include the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL), Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, NY), Allen Memorial Art Museum, (Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH), Amon Carter Museum of American Art (Fort Worth, TX), Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, MD), Birmingham Museum of Art (Birmingham, AL), Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY), the British Museum (London, UK), the Butler Institute of American Art (Youngstown, OH), The Dayton Art Institute, (Dayton, OH), de Young Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (San Francisco, CA), Glenstone, (Potomac, MD), High Museum of Art (Atlanta, GA), the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), The Israel Museum (Jerusalem), [citation] Laumeier Sculpture Park (Sappington, MO), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA), McNay Art Museum (San Antonio, TX), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, IL), Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA), Norton Simon Museum (Pasadena, CA) Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY, The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York, NY), Obama Presidential Center (Chicago, IL), Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC), Speed Art Museum (Louisville, KY), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY).

The Getty Research Institute acquired the archive of Richard Hunt in October 2022. The Richard Hunt archive contains approximately 800 linear feet of detailed notes and correspondence, notebooks, sketchbooks, photographic documentation, financial records, research, ephemera, blueprints, posters, drawings, and lithographs, as well as a selection of wax models for public sculptures. "Richard Hunt is one of the foremost American artists of the mid- to late-20th century," says LeRonn Brooks, associate curator for modern and contemporary collections. "I am thrilled that Getty, whom I first became affiliated with through my participation in the Getty Center for Education in the Arts during the 1980s, will be the home of my archive," says Richard Hunt. "The entirety of my papers, photographs, letters, and sketches trace the arc of my career and my contribution to art history. I hope that my archive will serve not only as a remembrance but an inspiration to others."

Personal life

Hunt married his first wife, Bettye Scott in 1957. She was a former fellow student at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1962, the couple had a daughter, Cecilia Elizabeth Hunt. Scott and Hunt divorced in 1966. In 1976, People magazine reported that “Hunt is much in demand in Chicago Society, though his reputation for being late is so notorious that hostesses never have sit-down dinners when he is a guest, only buffets.” Hunt was married to his second wife Lenora Cartright in 1983, until her death, from breast cancer in 1989. Cartright was a former dean at the University of Illinois who had also served under Chicago mayors Jane Byrne and Harold Washington as a city official. Hunt’s third and final marriage was to Anuschka Menist, a Dutch dealer in African art. That marriage ended in divorce less than a decade later.

Richard Hunt was regarded by his peers and the art community as an intellectual, humble artist. He was generous with his time with studio visitors and attended art events and functions throughout his life. Upon his passing, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago remarked, “Richard Hunt will be remembered as a generous mentor, incessant maker, humble talent, and inspirational man.”

Death

Hunt died on December 16, 2023, at his Chicago home. According to a statement posted to his website, he "passed away peacefully". He was 88. President Obama spent time with Hunt to pay respects just before Hunt’s passing.

Hunt's remains are interred at Oak Woods Cemetery in Chicago alongside his second wife, Lenora Cartright. A sculptural grave marker he designed as a maquette, called Spirits Ascending will be completed by his studio, as a large bronze memorial, and placed at the gravesite.

Kevin Young, the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), released a statement about Richard Hunt following his death stating, “Hunt's stature and impact cannot be overstated.”

Bibliography and Filmography

Newspaper, magazine, and journal articles

Hunt is the subject of hundreds of newspaper, magazine, and journal articles. Some notable sources include:

Speyer, A. James. "Art News from Chicago." Art News, n. 56, March 1957, p. 50.

Ashton, Dore. "Art: Welding New Forms." New York Times, 30 September 1958, p. 27.

Burckhardt, Edith. "Richard Hunt." Art News, n. 57, November 1958, p. 19.

Sawin, Martica. "Richard Hunt." Arts Magazine,n. 33, November 1958, p. 55.

Kramer, Hilton. "Month in Review." Arts Magazine 33, June 1959, pp. 49–50.

Ashton, Dore. "New American Sculpture." XXe siècle (Paris) Christmas 1960. pp. 85–91.

Johnston, Jill. "Richard Hunt, Yutaka Ohashi and Nathan Oliveira." Art News, n. 61, April 1962, p. 18.

Raynor, Vivien. "Yutaka Ohashi, Richard Hunt, Nathan Oliveira." Arts Magazine, n. 36, April 1962, pp. 52–53.

“A Red-Hot Hundred,” Life, 14 September 1962.

Lee, Sherman E. "Year in Review 1962." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, n. 49, November 1962, pp. 209, 227.

Kramer, Hilton. “Art,” The Nation, 23 March 1963. Reprinted in: Kramer, Hilton. The Age of the Avant-Garde: An Art Chronicle of 1956- 1972. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973. pp. 452–454.

S., L.H. "Richard Hunt." Art News, n.62, April 1963, p. 50.

Books

Hunt’s work, career, and life have been written about in numerous full-length books, including:

Dover, Cedric. American Negro Art, New York Graphic Society 1960, pp. 55–56, 142, 145.

Contemporary Art: Acquisitions, 1959-1961. Foreword by Gordon M. Smith. Buffalo, New York: Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1961. pp. 10, 55.

Contemporary Sculpture, The Art Digest Inc., 1965.

Meilach, Dona and Seiden, Donald. Direct Metal Sculpture: Creative Techniques and Appreciation, 1966.

Ashton, Dore. Modern American Sculpture. New York: Harry Abrams, 1968. p. 37, pl.XXXI.

Adams, Russell L. Great Negroes Past and Present, 3rd ed, Afro-Am Publishing Company, Inc., 1969, pp. 203.

Fine, Elsa Honig. The Afro-American Artist: A Search for Identity, Hacker Art Books, 1982.

Patton, Sharon F. African-American Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. pp. 212, 218, 231-232, figs. 111, 112.

Barnwell, Andrea D. The Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art, University of Washington Press, 1999.

Zorach, Rebecca, Art for People’s Sake: Artists and Community in Black Chicago, 1965-1975, Duke University Press, 2019.

Cahan, Susan E. Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power, Duke University Press, 2016.

English, Darby. 1971: A Year in the Life of Color, The University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Film

Hunt and his work have been the subject of feature-length films and film and television segments, including:

Five African American Artists

Directed by Dom Albi and released by Silvermine Films in 1971, Five African American Artists features the work of Barbara Chase Riboud, Charles White, Romare Bearden, Richard Hunt, and Betty Blayton. In the short film, each artist candidly discusses their artistic process, inspirations and the cultural landscape of the 1970s.

The Light of Truth: Richard Hunt's Monument to Ida B. Wells

The Light of Truth: Richard Hunt's Monument to Ida B. Wells is a 2024 feature-length documentary film, directed by Rana Segal, about Richard Hunt’s public sculpture honoring the life and achievements of civil rights activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett. The film was released on October 27, 2024.

Exhibition catalogs

The following exhibition catalogs have been published in conjunction with solo museum and gallery exhibitions of Hunt’s art:

Richard Hunt: Synthesis (2025), Georgia Museum of Art (Second edition).

Richard Hunt: Early Masterworks (2024), White Cube.

Freedom in Form: Richard Hunt (2024), Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

Richard Hunt: Monumental (2023), KANEKO.

Richard Hunt: Synthesis (2018), Georgia Museum of Art.

Sculpting a Chicago Artist, Richard Hunt and his Teachers: Nelli Bar and Egon Weiner (2018), Koehnline Museum of Art, Oakton Community College.

The Public Life of Richard Hunt: 21st Century Projects (2015), Krasl Art Center.

Richard Hunt: The Art of This Century (2013), Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum.

Richard Hunt: Extending Form (2012), Snite Museum of Art.

Richard Hunt: Mutable Currency Past and Present (2012), McCormick Gallery.

Richard Hunt: Wings (2001), William A. Koehnline Gallery, Oakton Community College.

Richard Hunt: American Visionary (2000), Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park.

Richard Hunt: Affirmations (1998), International Arts & Artists.

Richard Hunt artist monograph

A 352-page volume on the seven-decade career of Richard Hunt was published in 2022. It includes a foreword, three scholarly essays, an in-depth interview, and an extensive illustrated chronology of Hunt's life.

The book is a comprehensive look into Hunt’s work and career. It contains over 350 images including historical photographs, installation shots, images of Hunt in his studio, newspaper clippings, and full color reproduction photographs of significant works of art. The text includes an introduction by Courtney J. Martin, essays by John Yau, Jordan Carter, and LeRonn P. Brooks, an interview by Adrienne Childs, and a chronology by Jon Ott, who is Hunt’s official biographer

Oprah Daily declared it as "A lavish, trenchant retrospective of our most prominent Black sculptors."