Top 15 Richard Hunt Quotes

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.

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.

Sculpture is all about hard work and delayed gratification, and mysterious, harmonious, pleasantly jarring, revelatory spatial structures—having good times and bad times at the same time.

I am the thinking person's sculptor, joining metal manipulation to meaningful expression.

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.

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

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.

The goal is to wander, wander through the unknown in search of the unknown, all the while leaving your mark. Art can do it all: a life of doing things, a life of making things.

Sometimes it is not about making art. Sometimes it is about making statements about culture and history or history and culture with or through art.

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.

My sculpture begins and ends with what can be done with metal. Between the beginning and end are other considerations. The drama of the process of each weld involves a change of state from solid to liquid and back to solid. Repetitions of this process bring about construction, a new constellation of the real and the imagined, ruminations in metal. The material basis of my sculpture is metallic opportunities. Bringing pressure to the right points, I draw the aesthetic out of the industrial process. To me, metal is alive. The forms tell their own story—how they resisted the torch and hammer. From the mill through the studio to the gallery, park, or plaza, the sculptor's challenge is to bend the metal to his wishes, hammer it into his vision.

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.

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.

Trees have long been my metaphor, symbolic of my inner and outer growth—the taproot delving deep into my conscious and subconscious, the origins of my art, life, and family; peripheral roots branching out into other communities, cultures, a cosmos of interweaving inter- actions; a trunk and branches reaching up and out beyond their tips, leaves, fruit, falling here and there.