Martin Puryear

Face Down

2008

One of the most lauded contemporary American sculptors, Martin Puryear (b. 1941) has had — and continues to have — an impressive career. 

Born in Washington, D.C., where he earned a fine art degree from the Catholic University of America in 1963, Puryear started his journey not in fine art, but in craft. As a teen, he learned how to build everything from furniture to musical instruments to canoes. Later, following his undergraduate work, he joined the Peace Corps as a volunteer in Sierra Leone and learned traditional craft methods, including pottery, weaving and woodworking. He then studied printmaking in Sweden before returning to the United States and earning his MFA from Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture. There, he specialized in sculpture.

Blending minimalism with the craft arts, Puryear’s work is often abstract and large scale. His sculptures of hemp rope, wood, bronze and more are studies of both form and material. And beneath the surface, his works touch upon complicated topics, including religion and Black history: Several of his pieces acknowledge iconic Black figures such as Sally Hemings (Thomas Jefferson’s slave and mother to six of his children) and Booker T. Washington, a former slave who became a prominent leader in the Black community and founded what is now Tuskegee University.

Puryear represented the United States at the 1989 Bienal de São Paulo, where he won the festival’s Grand Prize, and at the 2019 Venice Biennale. He has also received the National Medal of Arts, the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture. Puryear’s works can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields in Indiana and the Anderson Collection at Stanford University in California.

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