LUMA’s Richard Hunt exhibition offers an inspiring message for young artists

Loyola University Museum of Art (LUMA)’s newest exhibition, Freedom in Form: Richard Hunt, was not intended to be a legacy show, but that’s exactly what it became. 

The exhibition that opened July 11 and runs through November 15, 2025, began to come to life two years ago when internationally renowned Chicago sculptor Richard Hunt—the artist whose 70 years of work is at its center—was still alive and working out of his Lincoln Park studio. On December 16, 2023, however, Hunt passed away at the age of 88, prompting exhibition planners to reconsider their approach. 

“We intended for Richard to come see it. We wanted him to be excited about it,” Lance Tawzer, director of exhibits and shows at the Springfield-based Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum (ALPLM), told Loyola Today. “We already knew it was going to be an important show, but all of a sudden that got dialed to 10.” 

The ALPLM was the first home of the Freedom in Form exhibition, which Tawzer says originated at the suggestion of Illinois First Lady MK (Mary Kathryn) Pritzker, who had commissioned a sculpture of Hunt’s for the Illinois Governor’s Mansion in 2019. Because of Hunt’s long legacy of working and living in Chicago, the team working on the Springfield exhibition knew they wanted, eventually, to bring it to the artist’s hometown. 

That’s where LUMA came in. The museum, located at 820 N. Michigan Ave., was the perfect size for the exhibition’s many artifacts, ranging from Hunt’s sculptures and maquettes to his tools, his personal workbench, and more than 250 books selected to represent his massive personal library of some 5,000 books spanning everything from Civil War history to poetry.  

The exhibition also marks a coming home for Hunt and his artistic legacy. The renowned sculptor served on Loyola University Chicago’s Council of Regents and as an adjunct faculty member, helping to raise the profile of fine arts education at the University. Two of Hunt’s sculptures—Angled Angel (2011) and Sea Change (1986)—can be found on Loyola’s Lake Shore campus, the first at Kenmore Plaza and the latter inside the Institute for Environmental Sustainability. These sculptures are just two examples from a prolific career that demonstrates Hunt’s talent for fashioning metals like bronze and steel into graceful, evocative works that illustrate powerful themes of transformation and renewal.  

 An artistic response to the Civil Rights Movement  

Rev. Michael J. Garanzini, S.J., who recently stepped down as president of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, was serving as Loyola’s president at the time Hunt was engaged with the University. What distinguished Hunt’s work, he recalled, was the ability to raise cultural awareness of the conflict between the African American quest for freedom during the Civil Rights movement and the broader societal pushback against the movement’s progress.  

 “These issues move through his art,” Rev. Garanzini said. “There’s this gravitational pull of racism as a force that’s pulling us down, keeping us anchored and stuck where we are. But [Hunt’s] art tells us there’s something lighter and more magical that can help us take off.”  

Wings, a recurring motif in Hunt’s work, found in pieces such as Wing Generator, Grow Wings, and Winged Form, are a visual reminder of “what freedom might look like,” Garanzini added. 

Hunt holds the distinction of producing more public sculptures than any other artist in U.S. history, and the exhibition makes clear how his sculptures were often in direct conversation with the nation’s ongoing struggle for racial justice and equality. The first piece to greet visitors to the LUMA show is Hero’s Head (1956), which Hunt created at the age of 19 after witnessing the open-casket funeral of Emmett Till, Hunt’s 14-year-old neighbor who grew up in Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood. 

Till was murdered in a widely documented racial killing in Mississippi in 1955, a brutal act that has been credited with sparking the Civil Rights Movement. His influence on Hunt’s artistic legacy is represented not only at the start of the exhibition but also in its closing bookend: a cast bronze maquette called Hero Ascending. Prior to his death, Hunt completed his designs for the Hero Ascending monument, a 15-foot-tall steel version of Hunt’s maquette to be installed at Till’s childhood home in Chicago, which will become the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley (MEd ‘71) House Museum.  

Ross Stanton Jordan, the interim director and curatorial manager at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum and the curator of Freedom in Form, said the decision to place Hero’s Head at the start of the exhibition seeks to offer a timely example of how artists can respond to unspeakable horrors with emotional sincerity.  

“This was his heart’s response [to Till’s murder],” Stanton Jordan told Loyola Today.  

Artistic freedom on his own terms  

Another focal point of the exhibition is Hero’s Head, a diminutive sculpture that measures just eight inches tall and six inches wide but carries massive significance as one of Hunt’s earliest works. It has never been on view in Chicago or anywhere else. 

At the time he made Hero’s Head, Hunt was enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was creating some of his earliest work. The school did not offer any classes or materials for learning how to weld, so Hunt took it upon himself to buy his own welding equipment and teach himself how to create the earliest prototypes of the metal structures he would come to be known for.  

Stanton Jordan said he hopes the piece—and the exhibition as a whole—will prove inspiring to the young artists who see it at LUMA. 

“I hope students can see [Hunt’s work] and be inspired by the fact that you can make things as a student, as a learner in an educational setting, that are really important to you,” Stanton Jordan said. “They may not get seen right away, but they are fuel in your tank for the future. Everything you make is important.” 

Jon Ott, executive director of the Richard Hunt Legacy Foundation and Hunt’s official biographer, sees another key message, which he hopes visitors of all ages will take away from Freedom in Form—the value of artistic freedom defined on one’s own terms.  

Hunt often distanced himself from being labeled as a “Black artist,” according to Ott, because he “wanted to be talented above categorization.” In Hunt’s own words, he “work[ed] as if race did not exist.” 

“This show is reflective of Richard’s journey towards freedom in all of its forms,” Ott told Loyola Today. “Political freedom, of course, from segregation and slavery, but also the freedom of an artist and the creativity, imagination, and freedom to express oneself.”