Martin Puryear: Nexus

One of the most celebrated and influential artists of our time, Martin Puryear (American, born 1941) has for more than half a century created work of startling beauty that is at once technically precise and conceptually expansive. His art demonstrates the enduring relevance of abstraction and its capacity to illuminate our present moment in history. This spring and summer, the Cleveland Museum of Art presents Martin Puryear: Nexus, the first major survey of the artist’s work in nearly two decades. Co-organized by the CMA and the MFA Boston, the exhibition also travels to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. 

Developed in close collaboration with the artist, Nexus brings together more than 50 pieces spanning Puryear’s career. It begins with work from the early 1960s and follows his innovations to the present moment. Sculpture, the medium for which Puryear is best known, is integrated with prints, drawings, and documentation of the outdoor commissions that the artist has created around the world. 

Puryear’s first one-person exhibition took place in 1968, and since then he has exhibited his art throughout the world. His work has been featured in the prestigious contemporary art survey Documenta 9, and in 1989, he represented the United States at the Bienal de São Paulo, where he was awarded the festival’s Grand Prize. In 2007, the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized a traveling survey of his work. Puryear received a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” in 1989 and a National Medal of Arts from President Obama in 2011. In 2019, he represented the United States at the 58th Venice Biennale. His recent commissions include outdoor works at Madison Square Park and the Storm King Art Center.

Puryear’s work is informed by his relationship with artistic and cultural traditions from places he has encountered through lifelong travels and research, combined with inspiration from wide-ranging social and natural histories. After earning his bachelor’s degree from the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, Puryear joined the Peace Corps in 1964 in Sierra Leone. The local culture and traditional West African woodworking techniques—for example, joinery, used in the making of everyday functional objects—left a lasting influence on his artistic development. In 1966, having completed his Peace Corps tour, Puryear moved to Sweden to study printmaking at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm. 

Following his formative experiences abroad, Puryear returned to the US in 1968 and began a master of fine arts degree at Yale University. At that time, many leading American sculptors were creating work that relied on outsourcing industrial fabrication. As he learned these methods, Puryear became increasingly committed to artistic processes of the handmade, noting at the time, “I can’t conceive of a piece independently of my hands being at work.”¹ 

Throughout the 1970s, Puryear’s distinctive style took form, as seen in foundational works, such as Self. Appearing at first to be a dense, solid mass, Self is light and hollow, enclosing unseen interior volume. Self was assembled piece by piece through cold molding, a technique Puryear learned through boatbuilding and that he has utilized throughout his career. 

Ever since he was a child, Puryear has been fascinated by the natural world. This is reflected in his choice of materials. Since his earliest days as a sculptor, raw wood has been his primary medium. Wood is unrefined and therefore close to its source in a living organism, in contrast to other materials, such as bronze and various metals, that are common to sculpture. Puryear explains that wood is “moving . . . as you work. It’s shrinking and swelling all the time.”²

Relatedly, since the early 1980s, Puryear has created sculptural evocations of birds, and in particular, gyrfalcons. As a child, he discovered this predatory bird in Birds of America by John James Audubon (1785–1851). He was struck by Audubon’s renderings of the contrast in plumage in the same species of gyrfalcon, one white and one black, determined by each bird population’s habitat. “At a very young age I was fascinated to discover what seemed like a parallel in the natural world to racial differences in the human species,” Puryear said.³ He continued studying gyrfalcons into adulthood, becoming a trained falconer. Two iterations of On the Tundra (1986, 2022), one made in solid cast iron with a dark patina and the other in white marble, are on view in this exhibition.

By 1987, Puryear had gained enough success as an artist to give up teaching, which had long been his primary means of support, to focus on his time in the studio. In the years that followed, he created some of his best-known and most celebrated works, such as Alien Huddle in the CMA’s collection. Composed with the artist’s characteristic precision, the appearance of Alien Huddle varies depending on the viewer’s position and perspective in relation to the work—as one moves around it, different spheres come in and out of visibility, revealing the many ideas a single object can inspire. 

In the past 20 years, Puryear’s long-standing interest in the body—from the fact of human scale to the construction of identity through apparel—has come to play a more central role in his work. This is seen in Big Phrygian, a dramatic representation of Puryear’s sustained engagement with the form and symbolic power of the Phrygian cap. It was also on view in his acclaimed exhibition Liberty/Libertà, through which he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2019. Since Liberty/Libertà, Puryear has focused his attention on significant permanent outdoor works, a practice that has occupied him since the early 1980s. His most recent outdoor work is Lookout (2023) at the Storm King Art Center in New York’s Hudson Valley.

In recent decades, Puryear has solidified his reputation as one of the most important sculptors of his generation. Across his formidable body of work, there is, in Puryear’s words, a “flickering quality” where seemingly stable opposites—open and closed, hard and soft, dark and light—are in dynamic play, demonstrating the potential of art to reframe fixed categories and ideas. 

Martin Puryear: Nexus is accompanied by an expansive and richly illustrated catalogue. The publication is anchored by five essays authored by a new generation of scholars: Rizvana Bradley, Joan Kee, Emily Liebert, Michelle Millar Fisher, and Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi. Additional perspectives enter the book through series of responses to individual works, contributed by thinkers and makers from a range of disciplines, including Thelma Golden, Maya Lin, and Kerry James Marshall.