Richard Hunt: Freedom in Form : Loyola University Museum of Art
Loyola University Museum of Art (LUMA) will celebrate the work of renowned sculptor Richard Hunt with a special exhibition that showcases his groundbreaking art and explores the history that so often inspired him. Freedom in Form: Richard Hunt opens July 11 and runs through November 15, 2025, at LUMA.
Hunt (1935-2023) was born on Chicago's South Side and made the city his artistic home. Freedom in Form presents Hunt's artistic achievement within the national narrative of the struggle for freedom and the delivery of liberty to all people-a heritage that motivated Hunt's 70 years of making art. Through Hunt's sculptures, maquettes, tools, books, photographs, prints, video interviews, and a chronology of his life, the exhibition will give visitors a glimpse into his creative process and numerous inspirations, from his early days as a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to his rise to an international renowned artist.
Freedom in Form tells the story of an artist affected by the civil rights struggle of his time and was committed to the artistic freedom of expression. For the first time anywhere, visitors will be able to see two works together that serve as bookends to Hunt's career. Hunt created Hero's Head (1956) when he was 19, after attending the open-casket funeral of Emmett Till, Hunt's 14-year-old neighbor who was brutally murdered in a racial killing in Money, Mississippi, in 1955. Till's murder galvanized the Civil Rights Movement and influenced Hunt's artistic practice. Before his death in 2023, Hunt completed the designs for Hero Ascending, a soaring monument for Till's childhood home in Chicago, which will become the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley (MEd '71) House Museum. Freedom in Form presents Hunt's life and work in the years between these two seminal works.
The exhibition is accompanied by a beautiful 116-page, full-color catalogue, featuring a foreword by Christina Shutt, director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum (ALPLM); a foreword by Rev. Michael J. Garanzini, S.J., president of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities and president emeritus of Loyola; and new essays by curator Ross Stanton Jordan, Hunt's biographer Jon Ott, and historian Timothy J. Gilfoyle, a Loyola professor. Catalogs will be available for purchase at LUMA's gift shop and on ALPLM's website.
