Word: puryear
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Shelter is a favorite image of Puryear's. For Beckwourth, 1980, presents a kind of solid wooden hogan with an ovoid top plastered in cracked mud, recalling both the primitive hut and the origins of the pendentive dome. (Jim Beckwourth is a figure often invoked by Puryear's sculpture. The freed son of a white man and a black slave woman, he served as a guide for various Western expeditions in the early 19th century, fought in the Mexican War and was at one point made a chief of the Crow Indians -- a symbol of multicultural America if ever there...
...Puryear's work has the exact American-grain quality -- if not the episodic fussiness -- of that earlier virtuoso of the dovetail and the lamination, the sculptor H.C. Westermann. It also has some of Westermann's laconic humor. Sanctuary, 1982, is one such piece: a cubical box of thick wood mounted on two raw branches with the bark still on them, which turn out to be "legs," pedaling a wooden wheel -- a sort of absurd unicycle, designed for flight...