Martin L. Puryear (born May 23, 1941) is an American artist known for his devotion to traditional craft. Working in a variety of media, but primarily wood, his reductive technique and meditative approach challenge the physical and poetic boundaries of his materials.Shearer, Linda. ''Young American Artists 1978 Exxon National Exhibition''. New York: The Solomon Guggenheim Museum, 1978 The artist's ''

Liberty/Libertà ''Martin Puryear: Liberty/Libertà'' is an art exhibition at the 2019 Venice Biennale's American pavilion featuring new works by sculptor Martin Puryear and curated by Brooke Kamin Rapaport. The Biennale is an international contemporary ar ...

'' exhibition represented the United States at the 2019 Venice Biennale.

Life

Born in 1941 in Washington, DC, Martin Puryear began exploring traditional craft methods in his youth, making tools, boats, musical instruments, and furniture. After receiving a BA in Fine Art from

the Catholic University of America The Catholic University of America (CUA) is a private Catholic research university in Washington, D.C., United States. It is one of two pontifical universities of the Catholic Church in the United States – the only one that is not primarily ...

in 1963, Puryear spent two years as a

Peace Corps The Peace Corps is an Independent agency of the U.S. government, independent agency and program of the United States government that trains and deploys volunteers to communities in partner countries around the world. It was established in Marc ...

volunteer in

Sierra Leone Sierra Leone, officially the Republic of Sierra Leone, is a country on the southwest coast of West Africa. It is bordered to the southeast by Liberia and by Guinea to the north. Sierra Leone's land area is . It has a tropical climate and envi ...

.Elderfield, John, and Michael Auping, ''Martin Puryear''. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007 From 1966 to 1968, he studied printmaking at the

Royal Swedish Academy of Arts The Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts (), commonly called the Royal Academy, is located in Stockholm, Sweden. An independent organization that promotes the development of painting, sculpture, architecture, and other fine arts, it is one of seve ...

in Stockholm, returning to the United States to enroll in the graduate program for sculpture at Yale University.Benezra, Newal and Robert Storr, eds. ''Martin Puryear''. Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1991 Although he discovered

Minimalism In visual arts, music, and other media, minimalism is an art movement that began in the post-war era in western art. The movement is often interpreted as a reaction to abstract expressionism and modernism; it anticipated contemporary post-mi ...

at a formative period in his development, Puryear would ultimately reject its impersonality and formalism. After earning his MFA from Yale, Puryear began teaching at Fisk University in Nashville and University of Maryland in College Park. In 1977, following a devastating fire in his Brooklyn studio, Puryear moved to Chicago and began teaching at the University of Illinois. In both 1979 and 1981, and again in 1989, his work was included in the

Whitney Biennial The Whitney Biennial is a biennial exhibition of contemporary American art organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. The event began as an annual exhibition in 1932; the first biennial was held in 1973. It is considered ...

at the

Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is a Modern art, modern and Contemporary art, contemporary American art museum located in the Meatpacking District, Manhattan, Meatpacking District and West Village neighbor ...

in New York City. He travelled to Japan in 1982 through a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship where he investigated architecture and garden design. In 1989, he was awarded the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and represented the United States at the São Paulo Bienal, Brazil. The Museum of Modern Art organized an exhibition in 2007 that traveled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA. In 2012 President Obama awarded him the

National Medal of Arts The National Medal of Arts is an award and title created by the United States Congress in 1984, for the purpose of honoring artists and Patronage, patrons of the arts. A prestigious American honor, it is the highest honor given to artists and ar ...

and 2019 he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale.

Artwork

The artwork of Martin Puryear is a product of visibly complex craft construction and manipulation of pure material; its forms are combinations of the organic and the geometric. His process can be described as reductive, seeking to bring work and material close to its original state and creating rationality in each work derived from the maker and act of making. This is what Puryear calls "inevitability", or a "fullness of being within limits" that defines function. Often associated with both

and Formalist sculpture, Puryear rejects that his work is ever non-referential or objective. The pure and direct imagistic forms born from his use of traditional craft are allusive and poetic, as well as deeply personal. Visually, they encounter the history of objects and the history of their making, suggesting public and private narratives including those of the artist, race, ritual, and identity. His work is widely exhibited and collected both in the United States and internationally. For close to fifty years, Puryear has created works that transpose his distinctive abstract sculptural language to a monumental scale. From his earliest outdoor work at Artpark, in Lewistown, New York, in 1977 to his newly inaugurated 2023 permanent commission for Storm King Art Center, Puryear's public and site-specific sculptures originate with the artist's hand, whether through drawings or with models that the artist carves or fashions from pieces of wood.

''Lookout'' (2023)

In 2023, Puryear completed ''Lookout'', his first large-scale sculpture made of

brick A brick is a type of construction material used to build walls, pavements and other elements in masonry construction. Properly, the term ''brick'' denotes a unit primarily composed of clay. But is now also used informally to denote building un ...

, at Storm King Art Center in New York's Hudson Valley. The artwork is a compound-curved domed shell, pierced by 90 circular apertures of various sizes. Visitors can walk around and into the sculpture, enjoying the views of the surrounding area. This project had been a structural puzzle until a meeting in 2019 between the artist and MIT professor and structural engineer John Ochsendorf unlocked a solution. Ochesendorf has extensively researched ancient and traditional architectural technologies, particularly masonry vaults and domes. Their meeting resulted in a near-instantaneous collaborative scheme that incorporated the principle of Nubian vaulting, an ancient building method with which Ochsendorf and Puryear were both familiar. Engineering services were provided by Silman Associates, Structural Engineers. At Storm King the construction was led by Lara Davis (Limaçon Design), a vaulting specialist and practicing architect. After refining the material selection and detailing the construction method, Davis collaborated with the Puryear Studio to build the sculpture. The work was completed over a period of two summers. Puryear considers ''Lookout'' to be the most complex sculpture he has completed to date.

References

External links

Roberta Smith's article in the NYT
Nov. 2, 2007
Martin Puryear at Matthew Marks Gallery
New York.
David Levi-Strauss interview with Martin Puryear
from Brooklyn Rail, November 2007
Puryear's Guggenheim Museum BiographyMartin Puryear at McKee Gallery
Martin Puryear at McKee Gallery, New York
Martin Puryear retrospective
at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2008–2009 {{DEFAULTSORT:Puryear, Martin 1941 births Living people Yale School of Art alumni Catholic University of America alumni 20th-century American sculptors 20th-century American male artists 21st-century American sculptors 21st-century American male artists American male sculptors Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters American postmodern artists MacArthur Fellows Artists from Washington, D.C. United States National Medal of Arts recipients 20th-century American printmakers African-American contemporary artists American contemporary artists African-American sculptors African-American printmakers 20th-century African-American artists 21st-century African-American artists