Martin Puryear

Art Brokerage: Martin Puryear American Artist: b. 1941. Martin Puryear was born on May 23, 1941. He is an African American sculptor. He works in media including wood, stone, tar, and wire, and his work is a union of minimalism and traditional crafts. In, 2003, he served on the Jury for the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art presented a 30-year survey of Puryear's work in 2008-2009. The presentation included "a special installation in the Haas Atrium including Ladder for Booker T. Washington, made from a 36-foot-long split sapling, and Ad Astra, a 63-foot-tall work that rises to the museum's fifth-floor bridge. Martin Puryear graduated from Catholic University of America in Washington D.C., and then joined the Peace Corps, traveling to Sierra Leone. He also studied art at the Swedish Royal Academy of Art, and attained his MFA in sculpture from Yale University. Puryear has had an illustrious career and has exhibited at numerous museums and galleries across the United States and internationally. His accomplishments are far too lengthy to list here, but some of the highlights of his career include a mid-career retrospective organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, which traveled to the Hirshhorn in Washington, DC, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania. He has created many public installations including for the City of Chicago, Washington D.C., New York, as well as for private collections including the John P. Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Listings wanted by Art Brokerage.