Puryear, Martin 1941–

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Martin Puryear 1941–

Sculptor

In the work of no other artist, perhaps, does the spirit of modern art come together with influences from the roots, African American and otherwise, as elegantly as in the sculptures of Martin Puryear. Puryear’s works are mostly abstract, only rarely depicting familiar objects and shapes. Yet each one seems to tell a story, one partly hidden from the world, yet emerging profusely through the multiple crevices and openings many of his sculptures contain. Each observer or art writer seems to find a different reference or meaning in Puryear’s pieces; he seems to have an uncanny knack for turning sophisticated art critics back into wide-eyed, free-associating children when they enter one of his numerous solo exhibitions. An uncompromising individualist in an era of group trends, Puryear has become recognized as one of the foremost artists in the United States.

Martin Puryear was born in Washington, D.C., on May 23, 1941. He was the oldest of seven siblings, several of whom became hands-on makers of things: a musician, a furniture maker, and a chef. Puryear’s father was a postal employee, and his mother taught elementary school in Washington. His grandparents had very unusual stories. One grandfather was a Baptist minister who moved to the Canadian province of Nova Scotia to take over a congregation there, and a grandmother repaired clocks.

When Puryear was six, he watched a black artist paint another man’s portrait on a Washington street, “and it just blew something open in me,” he recalled in a New York Times interview. He was given a scholarship to a local children’s art school (where for two years he was the only black student), but when he started college he majored at first in biology. Observing the school’s art faculty, Puryear realized for the first time that it was possible to make a living as an artist, and he switched his major to art in his junior year. At this time, Puryear was primarily a painter, working in a realistic mode. But he was strongly drawn to woodworking and built guitars, canoes, and furniture as a young man. Puryear graduated from Catholic University in 1963.

Joined Peace Corps

Like many other young people in the 1960s, Puryear joined the Peace Corps after college, traveling to Sierra Leone in west Africa for two years. The experience both dampened and strengthened Puryear’s sense of his African roots. The local villagers, he found, thought of him as a foreigner despite his black skin. “The name for me was the same as for Europeans,” he told the New York Times, “They had a word, pronounced ‘pumwei,’ which meant European or foreigner or white man. It was very clear to me that I wasn’t one of them.” Yet Puryear was influenced enormously by his encounters with African carpenters, who forged complicated objects without the help of mechanical technology. And the graceful forms of African sculpture left a permanent imprint on Puryear’s work.

By the time Puryear left Sierra Leone, he was determined to be a sculptor, one who worked with wood and one who, unlike most other modern sculptors, made

At a Glance…

Born on May 23, 1941, in Washington, DC; married Jeanne Gordon, 1986; children: one daughter. Education: Catholic University of America, BA, 1963; Swedish Royal Academy of Art, Stockholm, Sweden, attended, 1966-68; Yale University, New Haven, CT, MFA, 1971.

Career: Fisk University, Nashville, TN, assistant professor of art, 1971-73; full-time artist, 1970s-; numerous solo museum exhibitions beginning with show at Corcoran Museum, Washington, 1977; work exhibited at Sâo Paulo Bienal, Brazil, 1989; several large public art commissions, 1990s-.

Selected awards: National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, 1978; Guggenheim Memorial Foundation grant, 1984; MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, 1989; São Paulo Bienal, grand prize, 1989.

Addresses: Office —c/o McKee Gallery, 745 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10151.

his work by hand instead of using machines or delegating the handiwork to assistants. Most of Puryear’s sculptures have wood for a medium, and even outwardly simple pieces conceal the craft of a master woodworker. After leaving Africa, Puryear headed first for Sweden, where a sister was living. The smooth lines of Scandinavian design also left a mark on his work. Back in Washington, Puryear walked into the prestigious Harry Lunn Gallery and asked the owner to look at pictures of his sculptures. The gallerist brushed Puryear off—until he glimpsed one of the pictures. Soon some of Puryear’s pieces were included in a show Lunn organized.

Yet another layer of influences was added when Puryear enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts program at Yale University in 1969 (graduating two years later). Yale at the time was a hotbed of the movement known as minimalism—of the sort of modern art that used pure geometric forms and radically simple shapes, purged of any reference to the external world. Once again Puryear kept his distance from but was shaped by exposure to new teachers. “I tasted minimalism. It had no taste. So I spat it out,” the artist told the Washington Post. Yet Puryear was impelled to boil his sculptures down to their essentials. Most of his mature works, though they often carry titles suggesting realistic content, avoid the representation of familiar objects.

Won National Endowment Fellowship

Puryear taught at Fisk University in Nashville for two years after obtaining his M.F.A., and he later taught at the University of Maryland and the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois. Yet teaching never really agreed with the individualistic artist. “There were times I found it hard, or a struggle, let’s say, to encourage students to find themselves, because they were so busy being members of a group,” he said of his time at Fisk in a New York Times interview. Fortunately, Puryear’s reputation as an artist was on the rise and he was mostly able to devote himself full time to creative activity—at first with the help of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1977) and the Guggenheim Foundation (1984), among a host of other donors.

By the late 1980s, Puryear could rely on a steady income from sales of his sculptures. The international art world was alerted to his talents when he represented the United States at the 1989 Sâo Paolo Bienal in Brazil, a major exhibition, held every two years, that showcased important new trends. Puryear walked away with the grand prize, and that year he also won a prestigious grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Gallery showings of Puryear’s work now resulted in complete sellouts of the sculptures on hand, often at prices of thousands of dollars apiece. Puryear’s success was all the more remarkable because he avoided the usual corridors of power and influence in the New York art world and put little effort into self-promotion. Living with his wife, Jeanne, a musician, on Chicago’s north side, Puryear forged new work in a converted warehouse.

Dramatically different, one from another, Puryear’s works often seemed to advance right to the edge of depicting a realistic image or telling a story—and then to stop. “Plenty’s Boast” (1994-95), for example, was a large flared structure that resembled the traditional cornucopia or horn of plenty but also connoted other shapes such as a flower, shell, or antique record player horn, depending on the viewer. Even his rare representational pieces, such as “Ladder for Booker T. Washington” (1996) inspired diametrically opposing interpretations. His sculptures tended to mesmerize viewers. “What moved me most about his show,” New York gallery owner David McKee told the Washington Post, “was the way it slowed the viewers down. The respect they gave the art was evident at once.” Puryear agreed. “I think my work speaks to anybody who has the capacity to slow down,” he told the New York Times.

Art Transcended Common Distinctions

By the end of the 20th century, it was clear that Puryear’s sculptures transcended the controversies of the day, blending his various influences and experiences into unusually satisfying wholes. In an art scene fractured into competing schools of thought, Puryear’s art was described by the St. James Guide to Black Artists as “a body of work that quietly erodes such received art-world oppositions as high art/craft, subject/object, Western/other, and black/white.” Puryear’s first major museum show came at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery in 1977, and numerous others followed. By the turn of the century, most major U.S. museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, owned examples of his work.

In the first years of the new century, Puryear branched out into new projects, including a set of woodblock illustrations for a new edition of the classic Jean Toomer novel Cane (2000) and a growing series of commissions for large pieces of public art. “From an early age,” Puryear told the Washington Post in 1988, “I’ve felt like an outsider, for a variety of reasons. But I really love what I am doing. And I get to work alone.” By the early 2000s, it seemed, the works of African-American art’s great lone wolf had become well-established fixtures of the American artistic landscape.