Born in Chicago, Richard Howard Hunt attended The Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied sculpture as well as lithography from 1953 to 1957. He worked at the famed Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles in 1965. His work is in the collections of many major American museums.
Hunt achieved his reputation in the late 1950s with open-form sculpture of welded steel, auto parts, and other objects, often discarded industrial materials. Using combinations of mechanical and biomorphic forms in his sculpture, drawings, and prints, his art plays on these incongruities. His work challenges the viewer to determine whether the forms are natural or manufactured, or something of both.
[This is an excerpt from the interactive companion program to the videodisc American Art from the National Gallery of Art. Produced by the Department of Education Resources, this teaching resource is one of the Gallery's free-loan educational programs.]