The Cleveland Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, co-organize the most comprehensive exhibition of Martin Puryear’s (American, born 1941) career in nearly two decades. Following their presentations, Martin Puryear: Nexus travels to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Developed in close collaboration with Puryear, this exhibition introduces new audiences to one of the most celebrated and influential artists of our time.

Puryear’s singular work across mediums illuminates the expressive potential for abstraction in the present moment. Martin Puryear: Nexus begins with work from the early 1960s and follows the artist’s innovations in form, material, and process since then. Visitors encounter new works that make their first appearance in this show, alongside sculptures that are iconic and those that have not been exhibited publicly in decades. 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.

Martin Puryear: Nexus highlights the global histories that have inspired Puryear’s practice, offering a fresh and timely perspective on his impactful body of work. Puryear’s art is renowned for its elegance and beauty. While accentuating the work’s visual allure, this exhibition and its accompanying catalogue look beyond form. The exhibition’s interpretive frame, rooted in new scholarship, sheds light on the ways that the artist’s unique visual vocabulary has been shaped by his enduring interests in global traditions of material culture, African American history, and the natural world.

Martin Puryear: Nexus is accompanied by an expansive and richly illustrated catalogue. Designed and published by the Cleveland Museum of Art, with distribution by Yale University Press, this 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 a series of responses to individual works, contributed by thinkers and makers from a range of disciplines, many of whom are longtime interlocutors of the artist, including Nairy Baghramian, Alex Da Corte, Thelma Golden, Tom Joyce, Maya Lin, Kerry James Marshall, Pam Paulson, Julia Phillips, Charles Ray, and Billie Tsien. Alongside these contemporary perspectives, the catalogue features archival materials that have never been published.

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