Last week, after over 25 countries announced the artist list for the 58th International Art Exhibition, la Biennale di Venezia, the state department finally unveiled the American artist selected to represent the United States pavilion (after being over three months late).
African American artist Martin Puryear, who is known for his minimalist, abstract sculptures made of bronze and wood, will represent the country’s pavilion in Venice from May to November next year.
The exhibition will be curated and commissioned by Brooke Kamin Rapaport, the director of the Madison Square Park Conservancy in New York City.
“Martin has been, for decades, a distinguished American artist,” said Kamin Rapaport. “He has always imbued his work with cross-cultural currents and has spent a lifetime assessing global, cultural and political dynamics.”
“Lately,” she adds, “he has been thinking about how history defines the present.”
This exhibition marks the first time that a public art institution is taking the reins in Venice, so expect outdoor sculptures alongside artworks inside the 1930s-built US pavilion in the Giardini grounds of the biennale.
“Public art is viewed in the context of full democracy,” said Kamin Rapaport. “There are no admission fees, there is complete accessibility and its open to all.”
While biennale-goers will still have to pay an entry fee to gain access to the US pavilion exhibition in the Giardini, Puryear’s specialism in public art makes him an unusual choice.
“Martin Puryear’s appointment to represent the US in Venice is a testament to having a distinguished career,” said Nicholas Baume, the director of the Public Art Fund in New York City. “It’s a career in which public art has been indispensable, making it the perfect qualification for this important role.”
Puryear, now 77 and based in upstate New York, is a trailblazer of minimalist sculpture, much like Richard Serra and Robert Morris.
While this kind of artwork is not exactly known for hyperbolic political statements (and is often the type of work that makes for corporate foyers and sculpture gardens), Puryear could actually make a splash at Venice next summer – as his work weaves together African American history and slavery, while gracing sculptures with a contemporary, and sometimes comical, touch.
His work has been noted for having “beauty, warmth and humanity”, but other works are more cartoonish, like Big Phrygian from 2010-14, which is based on the Phrygian cap that became a symbol of liberty during the French revolution. With today’s pop culture references, it’s a closer resemblance to the red hats worn by the characters in the Belgian cartoon series The Smurfs.
In his piece Ladder for Booker T Washington from 1996, a tall ladder stretches far into the sky unto infinity. The piece honors Washington, an African American Republican born into slavery who was freed, built his own business and became a presidential advisor to Theodore Roosevelt.
Art historians have said Puryear’s work taps into the history of the African diaspora without being “preachy or teachy”, just as his artwork has been described as having “a complex worldview devoid of trendy critique”.
“The timing of the decision strikes me as significant,” said Sarah Lewis, assistant professor at Harvard University’s art and African American studies. “Coming as it does, when the United States has begun to grapple with the role of large scale public sculptures that shape our understanding of who counts in society.”
Puryear, the eldest of seven children, grew up in Washington DC and built musical instruments and furniture before studying art at the Catholic University of America in 1963.
He was a Peace Corps volunteer in Sierra Leone, studied print-making in Sweden and learned how to weave in Japan. After earned his MFA from Yale University, he then taught at Fisk University in Nashville in the 1970s, while maintaining an art studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
After a fire destroyed his studio in 1977, Puryear moved to Chicago and taught at the University of Illinois. He has held retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and received a National Medal of Arts from Barack Obama in 2012.
“For more than four decades, Puryear has created distinctive sculptures that combine modernist geometry with international craft traditions,” said Naima J Keith, the deputy director at the California African American Museum. “His work often resembles familiar objects, but Puryear avoids fixed associations of time and place.”
The artist previously worked with the Madison Square Park Conservancy for his largest ever public artwork, entitled Big Bling. It was a chain link-wrapped wooden sculpture with a gold-leaf shackle. It echoes his black iron sculpture Shackled from 2014, which resembles the shackles worn by slaves when they were taken by ship to America.
“To be ‘shackled’, as Martin has said in the past, is a verb and a noun,” said Kamin Rapaport. “To shackle means to restrain, as was the practice for enslaved people and for animals, but a shackle is also a U-shaped piece of hardware used in rigging and hoisting.”
A memorable sculpture from Puryear is Question, from 2013-14, a gigantic question mark slumped into a gigantic bronze sculpture. It’s a metaphor of what to expect at next year’s presentation in Venice.
As the artist said last year, minimalist sculpture is all in the eye of the beholder. “I tend not to tell people what they’re looking at when they’re in the presence of my work,” said Puryear. “I trust people’s eyes, I trust their imagination.”
