Word: puryear
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That would describe C.F.A.O., which Puryear completed this year. It consists of an old wheelbarrow that carries a timber framework tower that's over 7 ft. (more than 2 m) tall. Embedded face-first in the nest of wood is a replica of the underside of an African tribal mask...
...Puryear, who is African-American, was born and raised in Washington, D.C., where his father was a postal worker and his mother an elementary-school teacher. After college at Catholic University of America, he spent two crucial years in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone. What impressed him there most was not the tribal art but the well-made things of everyday life: baskets, boats, woven fabric. From there he moved to Sweden for two years to study printmaking and to experiment on his own with sculpture. "That's where it became pretty clear to me," he says...
...means making in a way that a lot of artists no longer do. Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst don't lay a finger on much of what bears their names. They hand their ideas over to studio assistants or skilled fabricators. Puryear is his own skilled fabricator; he has brought carpentry, joinery and boatbuilding techniques into his art. He knows that's a retro virtue. "To get your hands dirty building something?" he asks. "You can buy that nowadays. So a lot of artists buy a very high level of craft from somebody else. They don't put themselves...
When he returned to the U.S. in 1968 to begin graduate work at Yale, Puryear discovered minimalism. Donald Judd's boxes, Carl Andre's metal plates on the floor--there was a whole new world of militant reduction in art, of fiercely simplified forms, preferably in factory-milled materials. Meanwhile he also discovered the virtuoso cabinet maker James Krenov, who was asking how the individual qualities of each piece of wood could give a particular voice to whatever he made. With those models, Puryear had in place the elements of his lifelong working practice. He would put together things that...
From that blend one great work after another has emerged, all of them different, most of them hovering between the abstract and the recognizable. From time to time over the years Puryear has even edged into producing recognizable objects. As early as 1981 he made Desire, a giant wagon wheel connected by a long wooden spoke to an upright basket-weave stanchion, a thing forever in orbit around a center it can't approach. But lately he has been introducing into his work more of what he calls "things with a previous life in the world": wheels, tree trunks...