This historic work by famed sculpture Richard Hunt was crated in 1962. It marks a truly transformative development in Hunt’s style, when he freed his sculptural vocabulary from gravity through a pioneering series called Hanging Forms. This series brilliantly connects a myriad of social and aesthetic concerns. The works defy lingering expectations that a sculpture should be placed on a pedestal or directly on the floor. Instead, these forms hang from the wall. The hanging mechanism theoretically allows movement, but must be manipulated by an outside force to achieve momentum. Note the way Hunt’s Hanging Forms dangle from wooden gallows and contain a horizontal platform—material references to lynching. The embedded inference of the title Hanging Forms is a haunting reminder that between the 1880s and the 1960s, more than 3,000 Black people were documented to have been lynched in the United States, with many thousands more undocumented. Born near the infamous steel yards on the South Side of Chicago in 1935, Richard Hunt was delivered into a world of metal. As a young artist studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1950s, he perceived a Surrealist dreamworld lurking in the junkyards of Midwestern America. The cast-off, metal skeletons of the Steel Age—even then beginning to corrode in heaps across the rust belt—became lifelike abstractions in his hands, perfectly expressing the beauty and terror of a rapidly changing, mid-20th Century American Dream.