Martin Puryear

Martin Puryear (born May 23, 1941, in Washington, D.C.) is an American artist whose sculptural practice explores form, craft, history, identity, and material knowledge. Working across sculpture, drawing, and printmaking, Puryear examines abstraction, labor, allegory, and public memory through refined handmade construction, organic form, and a deep sensitivity to wood and other materials.  Puryear studied at the Catholic University of America, the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm, and Yale University, where he earned an MFA in sculpture in 1971. He also spent two years in Sierra Leone with the Peace Corps, an experience that shaped his understanding of vernacular building, craftsmanship, and the relationship between object-making and lived culture. His work often engages craft traditions, abstraction, architecture, and social history, using carved, bent, joined, and carefully finished materials to consider freedom, shelter, labor, democracy, and the symbolic weight of form.  His work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Venice Biennale, where he represented the United States in 2019 with Martin Puryear: Liberty. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Gold Medal in Sculpture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Medal of Arts. Martin Puryear lives and works in Accord, New York.