Richard Hunt (1935–2023) was a paragon artist of the twentieth century. He was recognized as a singular talent as a young artist, was well-regarded by his contemporaries, and became unparalleled in public art commissions across the United States. Freedom in Form: Richard Hunt presents Hunt’s artistic achievement within the national narrative of the struggle for freedom and the halting delivery of liberty to all people—a history and heritage that motivated Hunt’s seventy years of making art in America.
Hunt was born on Chicago’s South Side and made the city his artistic home, a perch from which he interpreted histories and myths with the materials that built the modern urban metropolis: steel, bronze, and aluminum.
Freedom in Form tells the story of an artist affected by the civil rights struggle of his time and committed to artistic freedom of expression and the possibility of transformation. Visitors will experience Hunt’s work and personal biography as it intersected with milestones in the struggle for equal treatment under the law. Hunt’s personal library, tools, and video interviews provide an expanded look into his life and artistic practice. Champions of freedom—Frederick Douglass, Emmett Till, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett permeate and frame the experience throughout the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum campus.
The exhibition is accompanied by a beautiful 116-page, full-color catalogue, featuring a director’s foreword by Christina Shutt; a foreword by Rev. Michael J. Garanzini, SJ, past president of Loyola University Chicago; and new essays by curator Ross Stanton Jordan, Hunt’s biographer, Jon Ott, and historian Timothy J. Gilfoyle, PhD.
