Meet the Honorees

He was featured on the cover of Time Magazine and included in the 2017 list of the “100 Most Influential People” compiled by Time. His novel The Nickel Boys won the Kirkus Prize, the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, was a finalist for the 2020 Southern Book Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. The Nickel Boys was a long-running New York Times bestseller and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2020, making Whitehead a two-time winner of the award. His most recent novel, Harlem Shuffle, was published by Doubleday in 2021 and won the UN Thriller of the Year. The sequel, Crook Manifesto, will be published by Doubleday in July 2023. President Biden awarded Whitehead a National Endowment for the Humanities Medal in 2023.

A descendant of slaves brought to this country through the port of Savannah, Georgia, Hunt grew up on the South Side of Chicago, first in Woodlawn and then Englewood. He was immersed in the cultural and artistic heritage of Chicago through art lessons at the South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC) and the Junior School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He made regular visits to Chicago’s major public museums and graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). As a student, Hunt taught himself how to weld. Only two years later in 1957, he gained national recognition when the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York acquired his sculpture, Arachne.

While serving in the U.S. Army, stationed at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, Hunt desegregated the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Alamo Plaza on March 16, 1960, when he became the first African American to be served there. This brave action made San Antonio the first peaceful and voluntary lunch counter integration in the South. Hunt was the first African American visual artist to serve on the National Council on the Arts, appointed by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. He was only 35 years old at the time of his 1971 retrospective exhibition at MoMA—the first for an African American sculptor at the museum. In addition, in 1981, Hunt served as one of eight jurors, the sole African American, for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial competition in Washington, D.C.

Hunt has sculpted major monuments for some of our country’s greatest heroes, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Mary McLeod Bethune, Jesse Owens, Hobart Taylor, Jr., and Ida B. Wells. His sculptures have commemorated events from the slave trade and the Middle Passage to the Great Migration. His massive 30-foot, 1,500-pound bronze, Swing Low, hangs from the ceiling of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, a monument to the African American Spiritual. Today, Hunt’s masterpiece, Hero Construction, stands as the centerpiece of the Art Institute of Chicago. And in 2022, Barack Obama commissioned Richard Hunt as the first artist to create a work for the Obama Presidential Center, Book Bird.

In 2022, a major artist’s monograph “Richard Hunt” was published becoming the definitive look at Hunt’s work and career. Additionally in 2022, the Getty Research Institute (GRI) acquired the Richard Hunt Archive. The GRI noted that “throughout his career, Hunt was central to important landmarks in African American art history and Civil Rights-era action.” The archive, approximately 800 linear ft., represents one of the largest artists’ archives in the country and an incredible source of documenting his life and work and the African American experience. 

When Hunt was nineteen years old he witnessed the open-casket funeral of Emmett Till in Chicago. Till who was abducted, tortured, and lynched in Mississippi in 1955, had grown up only 4 blocks from the home in Woodlawn where Hunt was born. Hunt would later remark “What happened to [Till] could have happened to me.” Hunt went on to create several works of art inspired by this experience which influenced both his artistic expression and his commitment to the cause of Civil Rights. In 2023, Hunt completed the sculptural model for the Emmett Till monument which will be, once enlarged in scale, installed at the childhood home of Mamie Till Mobley and Emmett Till in Chicago.

At 87 years old, Hunt has created sculpture for nearly seven decades. During that time, Hunt has received 18 honorary degrees and served on over two dozen boards, committees, and councils, including serving as a Commissioner for the National Museum of American Art, part of the Smithsonian Institution. Hunt received more than 30 major awards including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center, the Fifth Star Award from the City of Chicago, and the Legends and Legacy Award from the Art Institute of Chicago. Richard Hunt, working from his studio in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, is one of our country’s greatest artists.