What Is and What Could Be: The Enduring Legacy of Martin Puryear

The most interesting art for me retains a flickering quality where opposed ideas can be held in tense coexistence.

—Martin Puryear

The work of American sculptor Martin Puryear may, at a glance, seem spare. Abstract yet strangely biomorphic figures take shape in smooth and precisely rendered wood sculptures. Spare, of course, does not always mean simple. On the contrary, like the multitude of shades different wood-grains take on, Puryear’s elegant sculptures are laden with complexity, contradictions, history, and metaphor. Indeed, Puryear has himself remarked, “There are a number of levels at which my work can be dealt with and appreciated.”

The illusion of simplicity, which is one characteristic of his work, can be seen in an installation like the one he did for Oliver Ranch, one of a list of public art installations that also boasts Bearing Witness at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, DC, Pavilion in the Trees in Philadelphia, and North Cove Pylons in Battery Park City, New York. Located atop a prominent hill in the heart of Sonoma County, amidst seventeen other site-specific installations that make up the Ranch’s one-of-a-kind collection, Puryear’s sculpture has two faces.

From one side it looks like a stone wall 18-feet high, with a perfect roman archway at its base. This opening is covered by a cedar grate. In photographs, viewed head-on, it looks almost like the mouth of a moat, two-dimensional and unremarkable save for its precision and the whimsy it produces in this setting. But viewed from the other side, the cobblestone wall bulges out grotesquely, like a nautilus shell. The interior of the cave created by the wall’s ballooning backside is obscured by the cedar grate, so that the viewer is unable to decipher its depths. As the foundation notes: “This denial of admission to the sculpture’s inner secret continues one of Puryear’s themes, forcing imagination on the part of the viewer.”

Puryear was born in 1941, in Washington, DC. The oldest of seven children, early on he displayed talent working with his hands, constructing things like bows and arrows and guitars. In DC he attended the Catholic University of America where he obtained his bachelor’s degree in 1963. After college, as Puryear has described, he felt an urge to live among the people who lived in the part of the world that stamped him. This urge led him to serve two years in the Peace Corps, teaching in a remote village in Sierra Leone. There he would immerse himself in the native craft-making traditions of West Africa, an experience that still heavily influences his art practice.

In a piece like Deadeye, for example, a pale, pine sculpture from 2002, you can almost see the shape of an African gourd or jug left unstoppered. Or is it, in fact, a walleyed fish with its lips puckered? In sailing, a “deadeye” refers to a circular wooden block with a groove around the circumference, used singly or in pairs to tighten a shroud. All of these references comfortably coexist, emblematic of the associative properties of much of Puryear’s work, which in this case, however you interpret it, places his interests squarely with West African craftsmanship, the sea, and by extension the Transatlantic slave trade.

After his Peace Corps service, Puryear’s interest in local craft design and traditions led him to Stockholm, Sweden. There he studied Scandinavian design, etching, and printmaking at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts, and even met cabinet maker James Krenov. While studying and pursuing independent sculpture projects, he had his first of many solo shows at the Gröna Palletten Galleri in Stockholm in 1968. These early experiences abroad would lead him to concentrate much of his career on wood sculpture, although he would rediscover printmaking later in his career.

Upon Puryear’s return to the United States, he continued his education at Yale University where he received his MFA in 1971. From there, he would go on to teach...