Word: puryear
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...much more are those stubborn talents to whom the lyrical and the private are likely to be of more value than the collective. To such artists, beauty without cliche is a supreme goal, and there is probably none around who exemplifies this shift better than the sculptor Martin Puryear...
...best sculptors, of course, have always valued craft: good making, consummate skill. Quite often in America, those responsibilities were delegated to fabricators, as in most Minimalism. But the special intensity of Puryear's work comes from doing everything himself, mainly in wood (though tar, mud and wire also figure in his repertoire). Through the action of the shaping hand on wood, he brings forth a poetry of material substance that's unique in today's America. Puryear has always been troubled by the art/craft division in American culture. "At bottom it's a class issue really," he says. "'Art' means...
...viewer, the work's craft ancestry promotes a confidence in looking at it. Puryear's shapes come out of several parallel worlds of form, which, when prolonged, actually do meet. One is industrial--but "obsolete" industrial: the vigorous and noble shapes of what are now antique technologies, such as the carved wooden forms once created by casting patternmakers. Another is folk technology: basket weaving, canoe building, the construction of tents, yurts and kites. (Puryear had some conventional art-school training at Catholic University of America in Washington in the early '60s, but he also worked with African carpenters...
With a career growing, Puryear, 60, has done a number of public art projects in recent years. The latest (still in design) is for the state of Illinois, commemorating the first pioneer to settle in what eventually became Chicago: a fur trader named Jean-Baptiste Pointe du Sable, (1745-1818). Little is known about Du Sable except that (through his mother's Haitian ancestry) he was black. This became a matter of some importance to the city's black community, and Puryear, who lived in Chicago in the 1980s, has been approached about a possible monument to its obscure founder...
Though he would be the last to deny that in past years the art world, like most things American, has been disfigured by racism, Puryear does not find his own blackness an impediment. "Right from the start, I thought, No one can keep me from being an artist." He speaks of feeling the inaccessibility of Africa. "There is an incredible pain," he says, "that we black people feel at not being able to reach back and touch the country of origin the way that every other hyphenated American can and does. Being there made me realize how inescapably American...