EMPIRE LINES

Curator Sukanya Rajaratnam and biographer Jon Ott weld together African American culture and 20th century Western/European modernism, through Richard Hunt’s 1956 sculpture, Hero’s Head.

Born on the South Side of Chicago, sculptor Richard Hunt (1935-2023) was immersed in the city’s culture, politics, and architecture. At the major exhibition, Sculpture of the Twentieth Century, which travelled from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 1953, he engaged with the works of artists Julio González, Pablo Picasso, and Constantin Brâncuși – encounters with Western/European modernism, that ‘catalysed’ his use of metal, as the medium of his time and place.

Hero’s Head (1956), one of Richard’s earliest mature works, was the first among many artistic responses dedicated to the legacy of Emmett Till. The previous year, Hunt joined over 100,000 mourners in attendance of the open-casket visitation of Till, a 14-year-old African American boy whose brutal lynching in Mississippi marked a seismic moment in national history. Modestly scaled to the dimensions of a human head, and delicately resting on a stainless-steel plinth, the welded steel sculpture preserves the image of Till’s mutilated face. Composed of scrap metal parts, with dapples of burnished gold, it reflects the artist’s use of found objects, and interest in ancient Greek and Roman mythology, which characterise his later works.

With the first major European exhibition, and posthumous retrospective, of Richard’s work at White Cube in London, curators Sukanya Rajaratnam and Jon Ott delve into the artist’s prolific career. We critically discuss their diasporic engagement with cultural heritage; Richard collected over one thousand works of 'African art', referenced in sculptures like Dogonese (1985), and soon travelled to the continent for exhibitions like 10 Negro Artists from the US in Dakar, Senegal (1965). Jon details the reception of Richard’s work, and engagement with the natural environment, connecting the ‘red soil’ of Africa to agricultural plantations worked by Black slaves in southern America.

We look at their work in a concurrent group exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, which retraces the presence and influence of Black artists in Paris, and considers the city as a ‘mobile site’, highlighting the back-and-forth exchanges between artists, media, and movements like abstract expressionism. Shared forms are found in the works of French painters, Wangechi Mutu’s Afrofuturist bronzes, and Richard’s contemporaries practicing in France, Spain, Italy, and England.

Plus, LeRonn P. Brooks, Curator at the Getty Research Institute, details Richard’s ongoing legacies in public sculpture, and commemorations of those central to the Civil Rights Movement, including Martin Luther King Jr., Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary McLeod Bethune, Hobart Taylor Jr., and Jesse Owens.

Richard Hunt: Metamorphosis is at White Cube Bermondsey in London until 29 June 2025.

Paris Noir: Artistic circulations and anti-colonial resistance, 1950 – 2000 is at the Centre Pompidou in Paris until 30 June 2025.

Listen to Sylvia Snowden at White Cube Paris, in the EMPIRE LINES episode on M Street (1978-1997).

Hear more about Wangechi Mutu’s This second dreamer (2017), with Ekow Eshun, curator of the touring exhibition, The Time is Always Now (2024).

For more about Dogonese and ‘African masks’ from Mali, listen to ⁠Manthia Diawara⁠, co-curator of The Trembling Museum at the Hunterian in Glasgow, part of ⁠PEACE FREQUENCIES 2023⁠.

For more about ‘Negro Arts’ exhibitions in Dakar, Senegal, read about Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds at the Serpentine in London.

For more about Black Southern Assemblage, hear Raina Lampkins-Felder, curator at the Souls Grown Deep Foundation and Royal Academy in London, on the Quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend (20th Century-Now).