Martin Puryear

(American, born 1941)

Martin Puryear is a contemporary African-American artist best known for his large hand-crafted sculptures and intricate prints. Melding abstraction with traditional woodworking, the artist creates works which act as metaphors that explore the subtleties of culture and identity. For his seminal piece Ladder for Booker T. Washington (1996), Puryear created a crooked wooden ladder which dwindles in scale as it climbs from floor to ceiling, giving an exaggerated perspective to the work and obliquely referencing Booker T. Washington’s controversial advice to work hard as an African American in white society. “There remains this belief that the work itself can have an identity that can speak, whether it's through beauty, or through ugliness, or whatever quality you put into the work,” the artist has said. “The work doesn't have to be a transparent vehicle for you to say things about life today.” Born on May 23, 1941 in Washington, D.C., Puryear began his interest in traditional crafts starting from a young age. In 1963, after studying art at the Catholic University of America, he joined the Peace Corps and traveled to Sierra Leone, where he learned the local woodworking and craft techniques. The artist went on to study at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm where he was immersed in the austere aesthetics of modern furniture design. Receiving his MFA in sculpture from the Yale School of Art in 1971, Puryear has gone on to be included in the Whitney Biennial and documenta. In 2015, the Art Institute of Chicago organized the exhibition “Martin Puryear: Multiple Dimensions,” which opened at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York the same year. The artist currently lives and works in Accord, New York. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas, among others.