Artist Richard Howard Hunt died one year ago today at the age of 88. The sculptor, famous for his metal abstractions, was a titan in the art world. He undertook the laborious work of shaping and welding metal for seven decades up until just about the day he died. One of Hunt’s sculptures is currently on view in the Wilmers Building, but he’s had a long history with the Buffalo AKG. Several of Hunt’s sculptures were featured in In These Truths an exhibition at Albright-Knox Northland in 2021 of twenty-one living Black artists. Before even that, Hunt was featured in the first show of all Black artists that the Albright-Knox ever produced. Curated by guest curator Beryl Wright, The Appropriate Object featured seven contemporary artists. In the catalogue for the show, Wright interviewed Hunt about his work. In celebration of Hunt’s incredible legacy, we are republishing that interview here. 

Beryl Wright: From the late 1950s to about 1965, you explored two different approaches to welded metal: first, in what you have described as sculpture, in which “subject is conceived in the most general terms and derives from an observation of the formal and spatial contents of organic and machine structure,” and second, an approach aimed at showing “definite image-consciousness and often specific subject matter.”

Richard Hunt: That work was part self-expression and part advanced study of sculpture in terms of direct metal construction. There were some pieces that I was constructing using wood and metal which were confined to the years 1956 to 1957. After that, I decided to concentrate on metal, using both the more figure-derived and developed pieces and the linear pieces, but to do them all in metal as a way of being able to more freely explore the spatial and construction related considerations. I was interested in greater freedom and fluency with the medium at the time. I felt that by simplifying the means, reducing it to just working with metal, that was a way of opening it up for me.