Richard Hunt Quotes

To be creative is to not know what one is doing. The process of creation resolves the imbalance or irritation that initiated the desire to create something. Sculpture is a way of exploring, amplifying, and giving form to my enthusiasms, which are wide-ranging and often intersect each other, technically, emotionally, and spiritually.

I like working with my hands, making things and holding things. As a sculptor, I talk about using your head, your heart, and your hands— you think about things, you feel things, and then you use your hands to try to represent what that is, in some material.

Sculpture is not a self-declaration but a voice of and for my people—over all, a rich fabric; under all, the dynamism of the African American people.

I am interested more than anything else in being a free person. To me, that means that I can make what I want to make, regardless of what anyone else thinks I should make. My art is about art—embracing a vision of the future that is unlike past futures.

I am a Chicago artist because I am from this city; I'm a Black artist because I happen to be Black. These descriptions are sometimes useful to other people. But I'm also many other things—a man, a human being, an artist. Artists have a unique opportunity to make a difference . . . to look and work toward the future. Most people, by the nature of their work, have to think about what's happening now, to serve as kind of custodians of our culture; but artists have the opportunity and responsibility to be forward-looking. We have the job of creating new ideas and visions for the future, and I'm pleased to be a part of that.

I have always been interested in the concept of freedom on the personal and universal levels: political freedom, freedom to think and to feel. As an African American living in the United States, obviously issues like segregation laws, the civil rights movement in the 1960s or South Africa have been on my mind when I have dealt with the concept of freedom. But freedom also relates to my career as an artist: freedom of mind, thought and imagination. On the artistic level, freedom was a significant principle in the earlier art movements, such as Surrealism or Abstract Expressionism. More recently, public art focuses on the issue of universal freedom.

I must, I can, I will provide the physical evidence of my and my family's having lived upon this Earth, this planet. In the great scheme of things, it is less than a drop in the bucket, but it pleases me to be able to leave this evidence here for a time.

One hopes to see from what has been done, what can be done.

The creation of a sculpture can be considered the process by which a sculptor demonstrates to himself whether or not he is creating a sculpture.

One of the central themes in my work is the reconciliation of the organic and the industrial. I see my work as forming a kind of bridge between what we experience in nature and what we experience from the urban, industrial, technology-driven society we live in. I like to think that within the work that I approach most successfully there is a resolution of the tension between the sense of freedom one has in contemplating nature and the sometimes restrictive, closed feeling engendered by the rigors of the city, the rigors of the industrial environment.

Does becoming a critical thinker make you ever critical? You must stand somewhere on the stone steps of the drama.

Everything that exists, natural or man made, contains some sculptural quality or property.

Can the wisdom of the ages serve as the wisdom of the new age, the new millennium? Conventional wisdom is often not subject to or confirmed by independent research. The triumphal road for some can be a Trail of Tears for others.

It is often felt that the lyric or romantic sensibility cannot express itself in iron. The intent of a good deal of my work is to demonstrate that it is a possibility no more foreign to iron than to marble.

Imagining a world without racial hierarchy, I work as if race did not exist. Look the world over, learn, enjoy, luxuriate, dream large, expansive dreams of a glorious future for ourselves and all mankind. Then, we turn our attention to what is humanly possible.