The Chicago Public Library Foundation honors Richard Hunt with an Art Award. We talk with the artist about his career.

Richard Hunt’s studio is a repository of creativity that can give one whiplash. Upon entering the Lill Avenue cavernous structure, one sees light, shadows, books, cardboard and metal ready to be metamorphosed into something transcendental. Artistic works are in progress, and an artist like Hunt is always in process amid pictures and maquettes of his earlier works with metal.

Visitors can’t help but notice the books that sit on Hunt’s shelves in the office (ones that focus on art history, African American art) and his 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center (the “Oscars of sculpture”). At the rear of the work floor is an enclosed loft space that Hunt used as his living area until a couple of years ago. In the front of the workspace rests a proclamation from the Commissioners Court of Bexar County, Texas, citing Hunt’s participation in integrating the San Antonio Woolworth’s lunch counter in 1960 (reportedly one of seven to do so peacefully and voluntarily).

Hunt, an Englewood native, has made a mark on the world, as shown in the 2022 book, “Richard Hunt” by LeRonn Brooks, Jordan Carter, Adrienne Childs, Jon Ott and John Yau. The almost 400-page tome charts Hunt’s trajectory as an artistic force. He began taking formal art classes at the Junior School of the Art Institute and eventually became one of our greatest living artists, producing commissions for the Obama Presidential Center (“Book Bird”), creating “The Light of Truth Ida B. Wells National Monument” in Bronzeville and now a 15-foot stainless steel piece that will sit adjacent to the Emmett Till/Mamie Till-Mobley historic home.

Hunt has 16 honorary degrees, nine of which are from Illinois institutions, and now, he can add one more award to his 70-year career: the Chicago Public Library Foundation Arts Award, an honor that celebrates the power and impact of Chicago’s artistic community.

“Richard Hunt has this amazing sculpture at the Carter G. Woodson Regional Library called ‘Jacob’s Ladder,’” said Rica Estrada-Bouso, Chicago Public Library Foundation’s marketing director. “It’s an amazing focal point of the library. “We recently had an arts award added to our lineup of honorees, expanding from literature, doing civic awards and arts awards. Obviously one of the foremost people we have is Richard Hunt, who has had sculptures all over the world and singularly made the most number of contributions in public art across America.”

Hunt’s contribution to public art in the United States consists of over 150 public sculpture commissions. With names like “Chi-Town Totem,” “Sculptural Enlightenment,” “We Will,” and “Uplifted,” a tourist can get an education about Hunt just by traveling through Chicagoland. His “Swing Low” greets you when entering the National Museum of African American History and Culture, a gift to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Per Ott, Hunt has done works throughout his lifetime about freedom, emancipation, flight and ascension. Ott says Hunt is a bibliophile who collects and reads books voraciously. He also reads about five or six newspapers every day.

“And his inspiration is music, which is primarily classical. He’s been a big fan of Baroque music his whole life, also jazz and has some pieces named after jazz movements,” Ott said. “Richard is the most academic, modern artist of his time. There’s nobody more academic than Richard Hunt. The guy is a lot more than just a sculptor. As a self-taught artist, he has one foot in the history of Western art and one foot in African art.”

“Richard did a piece on the Underground Railroad called ‘Pass Thru’ at the University of Kentucky Art Museum in 1992. And it’s just a few blocks away from the underground railroad stop in Lexington, Kentucky,” Ott said. “If you look at Richard’s monuments, they’ve been done all throughout his life, but you can trace the whole history of the African diaspora from pieces that he did ... Name an aspect of African American history, and he’s done a monument on it in his life.”

Hunt’s prowess with bronze, brass, stainless steel, scrap metal and corten steel is so monumental, a book of the same name, “Richard Hunt: Monumental” was published this year. The hardback features the intense expression of Hunt’s face.

When asked about the visage, Hunt says: “Well, it just happened to be one of those days.”

87 years young, Hunt’s hands are a work of art. While the world is all about branding, Hunt is humble.

As Hunt states in his monograph, “Artists have a unique opportunity to make a difference ... to look and work toward the future. We have the job of creating new ideas and visions for the future and I’m pleased to be a part of that.”

This is an attempt to capture lightning in a bottle with an icon. He said in his artist’s statement: “It is one thing to make art that is a portrait, but for something like the Middle Passage or Emmett Till, you want to develop art that is not a portrait of Emmett Till but something that projects his life, ideas and ideals beyond his lifetime.” The following conversation with Hunt and Ott has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: How are we just now getting a book about your life?

Hunt: Well, you have to live it first. Those things take time.

Q: Thoughts on your award from the Chicago Public Library?

Hunt: It’s interesting because my mother was a librarian. A big, big thing for us was going to the library and getting books.

Q: You’ve done so many works. Do you have a favorite?

Hunt: When you’ve done a lot of things, it’s hard to say ‘well, this is it.’ I’m very interested to be doing the Emmett Till piece. The idea of … doing a piece to draw attention to him is important because it goes back to an earlier generation that we both came out of.

Q: How do you encapsulate monumental people like Ida B. Wells and Emmett Till in one piece?

Hunt: I would say it comes forward to me as I’m working on it.

Ott: Richard does deep, deep readings. When he was doing The Ida B. Wells, I’d come visit Richard and he’d have a stack of seven different books on Ida B. Wells — lynching, photographs and history. It’s the same thing with Emmett Till. If you were at his apartment, he’s got a stack of books on Emmett Till and things because he’s working on that piece. He’s in the moment but he has all that history in his head while his hands are touching the metal.

And during the pandemic, a book came out about Richard. It was the first time Richard talked about the fact that he was at the open-casket funeral. It also was the same summer that Richard learned how to weld. So Richard’s career started at the same time that he saw Emmett Till, who lived four blocks away from the house that Richard was born in in Woodlawn. “Heroes Head,” (welded steel) is the head of Emmett Till — he lost an eyeball, the skull is cracked, the face is smashed in on one side, he did this in 1956 a few months after he saw the open casket funeral of Emmett Till.

One of the things that Richard said before is, that could have been Richard because Richard, just like Emmett, went back to Georgia, to see his father’s side of the family, who was raised up a sharecropper. Richard said that could have been me because Emmett was just going to a corner store like Richard did so many times. Richard was a young man trying to figure out what to do, he was 19 and saw this person mutilated, lynched, tortured and killed sitting in front of him. Wouldn’t that change you if you were 19 and saw that face to face? It changed the world.

Some of his pieces are studied. For much of his career, he did many, many sketches. He’s also a draftsman and wonderful in two dimensions, which a lot of sculptors cannot say. He would plan his pieces that way, but sometimes he does pieces which he would call more improvisational, like jazz, where he’s just picking up material. He’s inspired by the sculptural shapes and he’s adding to them, putting them together, and that’s why he uses this term hybrid throughout a lot of his work because he’s hybridizing things, taking multiple different influences, putting them all together in the same piece. But even with all those influences, you look over the history, it’s about freedom, a lot of times it’s about flight which is freedom from gravity, which is freedom in the biblical sense, freedom, ascension. That all changed when he saw Emmett Till’s funeral.

Q: Do you ever say ‘I’m retiring’?

Hunt: No. I like coming here every day.

Q: Do you ever take a day off?

Hunt: Not if I don’t have to.

Q: Is there anything left on your ‘to do’ list?

Hunt: I’m just moving along, working on this one day and another piece another day …

Q: Any advice for the next round of artists?

Hunt: One of the things about being an artist is you can go your own way. Some people have a different approach to what they want to produce. They don’t have the relationship to a plan where the sculpture relates to some environment. Me doing something for Emmett Till, that’s one thing of putting something together and having a relationship with the environment. It’s not just making a nice sculpture.

The Chicago Public Library Foundation Awards will be hosted by Bill Kurtis on Oct. 24, more information at cplfoundation.org. Highlights from the awards ceremony will be released on YouTube Nov. 1.

drockett@chicagotribune.com