Never Before Seen Lithographs to Be Displayed with New Sculpture at the Carter

This fall, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (the Carter) will present its first exhibition examining acclaimed artist Richard Hunt’s works on paper that reflect his explorations outside of the sculptural form.

Hunt, a pioneering figure in twentieth- and twenty-first-century sculpture, was best known for his distinctive, large-scale welded metal commissions, which grace public spaces across the United States. Richard Hunt: From Paper to Metal will present for the first time twenty-five lithographs from the Carter’s collection alongside Natural Form (1968), a recently uncovered sculpture newly acquired by the Carter that anchors the exhibition as a three-dimensional counterpoint to the works on paper. The exhibition examines the spatial and figurative ideas Hunt explored during his 1965 residency at the renowned Tamarind Lithography Workshop, which in turn anticipated Natural Form, the exhibition’s singular sculpture and a rare example of the artist’s midcentury sculpture.  From Paper to Metal will be on view at the Carter from October 12, 2024, through March 2, 2025.

Richard Howard Hunt (b. 1935)
Untitled, 1965
Lithograph
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, Gift of Ruth Carter Stevenson
1970.338

Hunt is lauded as one of the most illustrious and prolific sculptors of the twentieth and twenty-first century and was the first Black sculptor to receive a solo retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 1971. His career stretched across seven decades and numerous locations, with Chicago at its center. Among the formative experiences that shaped his practice was his work at the University of Chicago’s zoological laboratory, a prelude to his lifelong interest in skeletal and organic forms—themes that are clearly defined in the Tamarind lithographs on view in the Carter’s exhibition.

“It’s especially poignant that this exhibition, which has been in the works for many months, will be on view in this moment after Richard Hunt’s passing,” said Andrew J. Walker, Executive Director of the Carter. “The exhibition provides space to reflect on the work of one of America’s most important sculptors, who is virtually unmatched in the canon of twentieth and twenty-first century American sculpture, and, through our acquisition of Natural Form, we are able to play a part in preserving and amplifying the artist’s legacy. By bringing Hunt’s lesser-known lithographs into dialogue with the sculpture, we are able to engage our collection in new ways and introduce new audiences to Hunt’s multifaceted practice.”

Richard Howard Hunt (b. 1935)
Untitled (Details V), 1965
Lithograph
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, Gift of Ruth Carter Stevenson
1970.288.5

From Paper to Metal offers an unprecedented look at Hunt’s midcentury artistic practice, pairing the Carter’s trove of unseen Tamarind lithographs with the newly acquired sculpture. Natural Form is exemplary of Hunt’s improvisational direct-welding technique, which allowed the artist to explore themes of growth and transformation.  Natural Form, which has not been on public view for over fifty years, comes to the Carter from the private collection of Terry Dintenfass, a trailblazing woman who transformed New York’s commercial art landscape in the mid-twentieth century and ran one of the city’s first galleries to represent Black artists, eventually becoming an early supporter of Hunt’s work. The Hunt lithographs are drawn from the Carter’s Tamarind Lithography Workshop Collection, which boasts a copy of almost every print made at the workshop from 1963 through 1970, totaling more than 2,300 lithographs. Debuting together, the prints and sculpture shed new light on the Carter’s collection and Hunt’s tremendous contributions to American art history.

The exhibition provides an intimate view of Hunt’s artistic practice, particularly the way he transformed the two-dimensional graphic ideas seen in the lithographs into the three-dimensional sculptures for which he is best known. Natural Form comes from an important series in which Hunt reclaimed automobile parts from junkyards. For this work, he welded a car bumper with other steel scraps to create a new configuration that merges industrial and organic aesthetics. The work reveals Hunt’s unique sculptural process with chrome steel, coating it with lacquer to make it vulnerable to oxidation and rust and eventually resulting in a bronze-like color. Natural Form is the first welded-metal steel sculpture to enter the Carter’s collection. While direct-metal welding was the primary focus of Hunt’s career, From Paper to Metal also spotlights the acid-tint method Hunt used across the lithographs—an approach he learned from master printer Kenneth E. Tyler during his residency at Tamarind.

Richard Howard Hunt (1935-2023), Natural Form, 1968, welded steel, courtesy Terry Dintenfass Inc.,
© Richard Hunt Revocable Trust

“This is an especially important moment to examine Richard Hunt’s contributions to American creativity more than fifty years after he produced the works presented in the show,” said Shirley Reece-Hughes, Curator of Paintings, Sculpture, and Works on Paper at the Carter. “Experiencing this rare example of Hunt’s midcentury sculpture in dialogue with the Tamarind prints, visitors will learn how the artist drew from sources ranging from industry, nature, geology, zoology, and surrealism in both his two- and three-dimensional art, providing an opportunity to explore Hunt’s interest in themes of transformation, evergreen in the story of American art.”

Richard Hunt: From Paper to Metal is organized by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.