A clipping from Ebony magazine shows Hunt introducing “John Jones” (1968-69) to dignitaries at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The work was commissioned as part of the Illinois sesquicentennial celebration of 1968. © 2025 The Richard Hunt Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Ebony magazine, April 1969
When the young sculptor Richard Hunt was asked in 1965 to create an homage in metal to a long-forgotten Black leader, he was already on the career trajectory to international acclaim as Chicago’s greatest sculptor. The commission was not only an honor, coming from organizers of the Illinois sesquicentennial celebration, but an intrigue, with a subject who was all but lost in the fog of history.
Hunt, who died in December 2023, was a deeply thoughtful artist who loved to read. He thoroughly researched the man he was asked to commemorate—an obscure figure from the Civil War era who went by the unmemorable name of John Jones.
The result—an unusual piece bearing an elusive history of its own—will be on view from July 11 until November 15 at the Loyola University Museum of Art. It’s part of “Freedom in Form: Richard Hunt,” an exhibition first shown by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield last fall through April of this year.
Planning for the exhibition began in 2023 while Hunt was still alive. The deal was cemented after the Lincoln’s executive director, Christina Shutt, visited Hunt in his studio. She decided that it was about time for the Lincoln to showcase Hunt’s achievements beside those of the iconic president.
“We [African Americans] have redefined ourselves through our artistry and humanity, and Hunt’s art has captured that long journey.” In fact, Hunt’s life embodied the journey, Shutt says. “This Black man, thanks to the struggles and sacrifices of so many before him, had been able to pursue his vision, nurture his talent, and become one of the most important sculptors in American history.”
Back in the sixties, after Hunt devoured everything he could find in research about Jones, he considered how to memorialize this remarkable man in metal.
John Jones was a tailor, a keen and successful businessman, an abolitionist, a conductor for the Underground Railroad and ultimately the first Black man to hold elected office in Illinois. Born free in North Carolina, he would come up to Alton, Illinois, where he met his wife, Mary Jane. Together, in 1845, they moved to Chicago and led a twenty-year crusade against the Black Laws, which laid out the legal rights of Black Illinoisans in contrast to the broader rights of everyone else. Other states had Black Laws too, but few were as harsh.
The couple’s campaign succeeded, with racist laws repealed shortly before the start of the war. At the same time, Lincoln’s home state became the first to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
Jones was elected a Cook County Commissioner in 1871. He squeezed in two four-year terms before his death, fighting all the while for integrated schools.
Hunt with “John Jones.” (1968-69) (foreground) © 2025 The Richard Hunt Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Hunt, over his long and productive career, would create many memorial pieces, most honoring Black people. Pieces of this nature make up about a third of “Freedom in Form.” They are almost all abstracts, like his other works—hinting at a human figure perhaps, but also hinting at birds, trees and car parts, rock formations and fish, industrial equipment and other things that would be difficult to describe.
But to honor John Jones, the thirty-year-old Hunt reached into his background as a figurative artist, creating a work the image of which could illustrate a children’s book. It is plain and simple. It represents not Jones himself, but the communal striving to which Jones was dedicated. In visual terms that any preschooler could understand, Hunt depicted the struggle of the Black man to advance.
He did this by executing a life-size cartoon man in welded aluminum. Hunt’s works are never static, and this aluminum man is no exception. He does not stand still as a typical statue stands. He has no pedestal. Instead, he is placed on a set of steps suggesting a staircase, endeavoring to ascend but heavily impeded. As Hunt told Ebony magazine in 1969, “I made him look as if he is climbing, burdened with weights that are part of him.”
His right arm is hidden from view, subsumed in what—though rendered in the lightest of metals—looks like a large hunk of concrete, carried on his shoulder and obscuring his right eye. His left foot is trapped inside another heavy block. His features bear no ready resemblance to the Jones of flesh and blood, who, in keeping with his time, had his facial hair styled in exaggerated mutton chops. The aluminum man has no hair at all—it’s just the face of someone who’s seen sorrow and difficulty over a long, long time, and who is not going to give up.
“John Jones” was introduced to the public with fanfare in 1968, during a sesquicentennial revel at Chicago’s year-old Museum of Contemporary Art. There the piece would be displayed for several months, and scrutinized by many influential eyes.
After the hubbub of the sesquicentennial died down, “John Jones” waited in storage for six months while discussions were held about where it should go next. Also waiting was a companion piece by another young Illinois sculptor, Frank Gallo, likewise commissioned for the state anniversary. (Gallo’s statue memorialized Major Daniel Pope Cook, for whom Cook County was named.)
Gallo was on the Urbana faculty of the University of Illinois, while Hunt had taught at the university’s Navy Pier campus from 1960 to 1962. Iconoclastic architect Walter Netsch was already a longtime collector of Hunt’s work by 1965, when his design for the university’s Chicago Circle campus came to life. Perhaps for these reasons, the two sculptures were given to University of Illinois at Chicago. Plans were laid to ensconce the duo in a Sesquicentennial Lounge on campus—possibly in Circle Center, the busy student union.
This unpublished portrait from 1969 was a key to the recreation of the stairsteps upon which Hunt is seated, with “John Jones” (1968-69) behind him. Under the direction of the artist’s estate, careful examination revealed the correct scaling for the steps. © 2025 The Richard Hunt Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
What happened next? Documentation from that pre-digital era is scarce, and mysteries remain. Among them is the fate of “John Jones”’ stairsteps, which were absent from later exhibits and had to be recreated for the Lincoln Library show.
If only the aluminum man could tell us his story. Sixty years ago he was naught but a twinkle in Richard Hunt’s eye, but he’s been through a lot since then. His one visible eye, carved with fire out of the hollow metal, resembles the entrance to a deep cavern. He is an old soul.
“People have always seen birds flying and wished they could fly.”
Circle Campus seemed like an ideal home for him. Planned to accommodate tens of thousands of college students, what came to be called UIC was Chicago’s first public university. Graduate schools were quickly added. By 1969, Circle’s throng of middle- and working-class youth was the fastest-growing student body in the country, and the campus was a hive of political activism around civil rights, labor and the Vietnam War.
“John Jones” arrived on the UICC campus during the heady days of late spring,1969, ready to meet more people and to join the conversation on racial justice.
After this, his journey is hard to trace. The catalog for the “Freedom in Form” show reports his installation on Circle Campus based on documentation of the above-mentioned plan. But my inquiries revealed that the plan was never executed.
According to university archives, installation and dedication ceremonies at UICC were postponed until fall when a key dignitary would return from abroad. Meanwhile, Hunt borrowed his piece for another exhibit and to make some minor modifications, pushing the planned installation into early 1970. These details were furnished in a letter to the UIC president from architecture professor Leonard Currie, first dean of the School of Architecture and Art.
Professor Currie reported that by the time the statue came back to Circle, the turmoil over the Vietnam War had escalated. “The student unrest, protests and vandalism had reached such a pitch at the Circle Campus and across the nation that it seemed imprudent, and inviting trouble, to install these sculptured human figures anywhere on the campus. The figures… are now accumulating dust in a storeroom on the Medical Center campus.”
There is no small irony in the notion that “John Jones”’ visibility on campus would be “imprudent, and inviting trouble.” The figure honored a Black abolitionist, and its wordless message against racism was more obvious than any message conveyed in a typical Hunt abstract.
In fact, during the same period Hunt faced scathing criticism from Black artists who objected to his abstract language. They believed that every piece of art from a Black artist should clearly express social-justice themes. They rejected abstract work because it could not be readily interpreted.
“Richard Hunt cannot have a retrospective at MoMA,” decreed painter and activist Faith Ringgold, a leader of the Artist Workers’ Coalition, in 1971. The group had laid siege to New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, demanding attention be paid to Black artists. MoMA had responded, in part, by attending to Hunt with a landmark retrospective. But Hunt was not the sort the AWC had in mind as the first Black artist to receive this signal honor.
In the superb catalog for “Freedom in Form,” curator Ross Stanton Jordan notes that “In AWC’s estimation, Hunt’s [works], lacking legible Blackness, were an insufficient incursion on the walls of the standard-bearer institution.”
The show went forward anyway. “Nothing wrong with that,” Hunt said in an interview for a 2022 monograph on his life and work. Asked by art historian Adrienne L. Childs about the 1971 controversy, he showed no rancor—only the implacable individuality and iron persistence that he shared with his sculptures.
Childs: “You were very adamant that race was not essentially embedded in the art itself, just because the artist is Black.”
Hunt: “Not in my art. I mean, other artists might feel it was their duty to project what the African American community was feeling or thinking, whereas my work was pursuing the interests that I had.
“It’s about personal and collective freedom,” he wrote in 2001, describing the abundance of winged forms in his oeuvre. “My use of these forms has roots and resonances in the African American experience and is also a universal symbol. People have always seen birds flying and wished they could fly.”
In Leonard Currie’s 1973 letter to the UIC president—written from Malaysia, where he’d been living for eighteen months—the professor timidly opined: “If the Vietnam War is indeed over, and if relative calm has returned to university campuses, perhaps it is now safe to install the pieces.”
Indeed, the Paris Peace Accords had been signed almost a year earlier, and the war protests had died down. But no further correspondence was found at UIC concerning “John Jones.”
Richard Hunt’s “John Jones” (1968-69) on his newly-recreated steps. © 2025 The Richard Hunt Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
The faculty concerns were legitimate: Public art is often misunderstood, and is ever in danger. And demonstrations don’t always follow logic. Hunt knew this all too well: His very first public installation, commissioned in 1960 by the senior class of Southern University in Baton Rouge and unveiled that spring at commencement, was demolished during a period of campus unrest at the end of the year. Hunt had considered “Spirit Ascending” to be his finest accomplishment.
Another irony: The unruly demonstrations were sparked by a victory for the student body. The U.S. Supreme Court had overturned Southern’s expulsion of seven students who had participated in a March 1960 sit-in against segregation at a Baton Rouge lunch counter.
Hunt himself—then an Army private stationed in peacetime San Antonio—had desegregated the lunch counter of a local Woolworth’s. Accompanied only by two white friends, he was served without trouble, as were Black patrons who dropped in on several other San Antonio establishments. Their actions, executed during Hunt’s most politically active year, stand as the first peaceful and voluntary lunch-counter desegregations in the South.
But the students in Baton Rouge were arrested, prosecuted, booted from the university and denied their diplomas. Among them was the senior class president, who had hosted Hunt when he visited the campus to scope out the site for “Spirit Ascending.”
Hunt didn’t complain about the loss of his prized piece. But he did take a lesson from its demolition.
“Spirit Ascending,” like other early works including the “Steel Bloom” pieces on view at Loyola, was a relatively delicate assemblage of scrap metal. It comprised slender stalks suggesting the stems or stamens of a plant or the legs of an insect, and thin plates resembling an insect’s wings, or petals, or leaves.
Henceforward, his public sculptures (they number more than 160) would be heavy-duty constructions, made from indestructible materials like Cor-Ten, bronze and stainless steel.
Neither would Hunt continue to take such an active part in politics after 1960. He was simply too busy making art. Throughout his life, he rejected the appellation “activist.” A remark he once made to a close friend, composer T. J. Anderson, makes his attitude clear. Anderson said, “If there were a riot, I would be out there in the front row.” Hunt replied, “I would be in my studio creating sculptures about the march. Artists do what artists do.”
Many times he broke racial barriers simply by being himself. Reporting for Army duty in San Antonio, he persuaded the brass not only to change his assignment from medic to illustrator, but to permit him—as an accommodation of his sculpting work—to rent a house in a complex built exclusively for officers. All of the officers, of course, were white.
As for “John Jones,” who by 1973 had been waiting four years in that dusty campus storeroom, we can only infer that UIC gave up entirely on his installation. He landed instead at the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center.
We have no evidence that the stairsteps arrived with him.
Unlike the UIC staff, the DuSable’s Director of Exhibits, Martin Giese, declined to answer emailed questions about the sculpture’s arrival there, its exhibition history or its future. “John Jones” was in the custody of the DuSable until last year, when he joined nineteen other Hunt sculptures (and eleven maquettes for public pieces) at the Lincoln show.
“John Jones” (1968-69) arrived at the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center without the stairsteps, as shown in this 2019 poster advertising a rare exhibition of the sculpture. © 2025 The Richard Hunt Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy the Dusable Black History Museum and Education Center.
I saw him on display at the DuSable in the 1980s and don’t remember any steps. A photo of “John Jones” was featured on a DuSable poster in 2019. No steps. Just a figure of a man who, with one foot anchored to the ground and a huge concrete block on his shoulder, appeared to be dancing.
Some light was shed on the mystery by Garland Martin Taylor, a Black sculptor from the South Side who was a great admirer of Hunt. Taylor had been introduced to his future role model when he was a small child, and again while in college at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
“I was starstruck,” he says of that second meeting, which took place on a field trip to Hunt’s studio. Hunt must have been tickled to receive a classful of student welders from his alma mater. He’d taught himself, since SAIC offered no welding instruction when he was there.
Taylor, as a small boy, knew of art only as painting until his godmother took him to see Hunt’s work in the building where he lived, part of the large Lake Meadows housing complex on the Near South Side. This was a major epiphany, says Taylor: “It was my introduction to sculpture. I learned what an artist is looking into the face of Richard Hunt.”
It was a kind, paternal visage, warmly welcoming a little Black boy. And it was more than that. When Taylor grew up, he realized that Hunt’s was “the face of a whole genre.”
After receiving his sculpture diploma in 2007, Taylor worked for several years as an art handler for the DuSable and other museums. He spotted “John Jones” in a dark corner of the DuSable vault and thought, “This shouldn’t be stuck down here. It needs to see the light of day.”
“My use of these [winged] forms has roots and resonances in the African American experience and is also a universal symbol.”
Around 2010, Taylor arranged with Hunt and the DuSable to briefly borrow “John Jones” and include it in an exhibit at his own West Side studio. The event, celebrating Chicago sculptors who had inspired Taylor, was packed with his family and friends—including his former teacher at SAIC, Preston Jackson, who showed up alongside Hunt himself.
Taylor was not prepared for this. “I was honored beyond belief.” When it came time for him to speak to the gathering, he says, “Minutes went by. I couldn’t say a word.”
Taylor admits to being puzzled by “John Jones’’ lifted foot. But he says of the DuSable vault, “I had been through every inch of that place. There were no stairs.”
Workman from Vector Custom Fabricating positioning Richard Hunt’s “John Jones” (1968-69) on his newly-recreated steps. © 2025 The Richard Hunt Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Hunt’s biographer, Jon Ott, realized something was wrong several years ago when he came across the 2019 poster, with its photo of a stairless “John Jones” promoting an exhibition of rarely shown pieces from the DuSable collection.
Ott had been poring over old news clippings. He’d seen photos of the sculpture at its unveiling that were published as part of a 1969 feature in Ebony magazine. Included was an evocative photographic portrait of the young Hunt with “John Jones” at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Hunt was sitting on the steps, one wiry leg extended across the tile floor toward the viewer.
It was those tiles, and Hunt’s shoes, that enabled the reconstruction of the lost stairs for “Freedom in Form.”
The Lincoln Library exhibition itself was instigated by the Illinois First Lady, M.K. Pritzker. The gubernatorial couple had already commissioned a Hunt sculpture for the Lincoln Parlor of the Governor’s Mansion. They had the state declare April 24, 2023, as Richard Hunt Day, and they wanted to honor him further. Ott was thrilled at an opportunity to dust off “John Jones” and recreate the stairsteps that made his existence meaningful. The aluminum man would climb once again.
Now for recreating the steps. There was a small maquette in the studio, but it was not enough: This was a precision job, far more complicated than the casual viewer might imagine.
How to scale the steps? Ott went to the Ebony clipping and compared the tiles in the photograph to a pair of Hunt’s left-behind shoes. Thus he estimated the size of the tiles. Count the tiles occupied by the steps in the photo, perform some simple arithmetic, and voilà! Nothing if not meticulous, the biographer confirmed his estimate by examining architectural records from the MCA and old catalogs from tile manufacturers.
Shop drawing for refabrication of Richard Hunt’s “John Jones” (1968-69) stairsteps. Courtesy of Vector Custom Fabricating
After a series of delays, Vector Custom Fabricating was enjoined to execute what was now a rush job. The staff made a shop drawing based on Ott’s dimensions. They calculated costs and ordered materials. The stairsteps in crude form were tack-welded together, placed on the back of a truck, and driven to the DuSable, where a crane lowered the statue into place for fitting. Care was taken to angle it precisely in agreement with archival photos. The steps then went back to the fabricator for welding, grinding and surface finishing before they were attached to the human figure.
If a man made of metal can be glad, certainly “John Jones” must have been glad to get back on the upward path where Hunt had placed him at the start.
Perhaps he was happy, too, to get out of town for a spell, out into the light, and once again to be the center of attention. During the Lincoln exhibition he was positioned, not with the other sculptures, but in the public lobby of the Lincoln Library, where events for scholars are held and where any visitor would encounter him.
Curator Ross Jordan says that the Lincoln Library encouraged him to use locations beyond the Illinois Gallery, its main exhibition space. “The Jones sculpture felt out of place among the other more abstract pieces,” he says. But given its size and materials, it could hold its own in the Library wing. I also liked having it near the Adlai Stevenson Room. For me this lifted up the question: How do we celebrate lesser-known Illinois figures?”
It would have been nice if, while in Springfield, “John Jones” could have been introduced to Hunt’s bronze of Adelbert Roberts, Illinois’ first Black state senator.
Commissioned by the state in 1984, “Roberts” stands in the Capitol Rotunda, where its addition completed a pantheon of illustrious Illinois officeholders. Hunt made a very traditional portrait, detailed and realistic, to match the others. One subtle difference: It’s the only statue among sixteen with a closed fist, alluding to the subject’s intolerance of racism.
Richard Hunt’s sculptural portrait of Illinois’ first Black state senator, Adelbert Roberts, was added in 1984 to the pantheon in the state’s Capitol Rotunda. © 2025 The Richard Hunt Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Roberts was a Michigan-born graduate of Northwestern University Law School, and was said to be a close friend of Booker T. Washington. He was elected to three terms in the Illinois House before joining the Senate.
Following the Chicago Race Riot of 1919, Representative Roberts was appointed to the Chicago Commission on Race Relations. The panel dissected the events surrounding the murder of Eugene Williams, a Black youth of seventeen who, floating on a raft with a couple of friends, unwittingly drifted too near a beach that was unofficially reserved for white people. He drowned after a white man threw a rock that struck him in the head. A weeklong melee ensued. Twenty-three Black and fifteen white people were killed, hundreds were injured, and a thousand Black families were left homeless.
The commission produced an exhaustive 667-page analysis of systemic racism, published in 1922 and entitled “The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot.”
Roberts was appointed to the state Senate in 1925 to fill a vacancy, and re-elected twice. His fifteen years of service in the Statehouse are emblazoned on his tombstone.
Loftily situated on the second floor of the rotunda, “Roberts” couldn’t leave his post to travel to Chicago. But the Lincoln Library did include him in the catalog. As a result, he’s received more attention than he had in some time.
Meanwhile, “John Jones,” once he leaves Loyola come November, may find himself back in storage, like so many sculptures belonging to museum collections. Except for a few pieces on perpetual exhibit in large venues, the social life of a museum-owned sculpture swings wildly between extreme exposure and isolation.
Sculptor Taylor, asked how often “John Jones” was likely shown by the DuSable, says, “I don’t think very often at all. It’s a small museum with very little budget, and there are so many pieces in that vault. Hundreds of pieces. It’s like that in every museum. In a small museum, you get a backlog [of pieces waiting to be shown].”
When Taylor worked at the DuSable, “All of the employees wanted to do the right thing by the art… [but] somebody’s got to fund the exhibit. You need a curator, and you need a theme. You need money to produce a catalog, to produce written materials, to pay handlers, to hold an opening event.”
It also helps to have a website with a searchable online database, featuring photos and vital facts about every piece in your collection. This luxury, forbidding to small museums, enables discovery of the pieces by curators and other art enthusiasts.
“Most museums only show a tiny fraction of their collections,” biographer Ott says. “This issue is compounded when the budget is low.”
On one of the rare occasions when “John Jones” was exhumed from storage, he was hoisted with a crane, cigarette butts dropping from his eye.
But now, like a rock star emerging from seclusion, he’s on a comeback tour that will be his longest and most acclaimed to date. From the hallowed halls of power in the downstate capital to a historic landmark setting in the big city where he was born, “John Jones” is meeting more people than ever before.
When you go to see him—because how can you not?—you can also view other memorial pieces that Hunt made.
Hunt created “Hero’s Head” (1956) at age 19 after attending the open-casket funeral of Emmett Till. © 2025 The Richard Hunt Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London. Courtesy of White Cube. Photo © On White Wall
There are two very different tributes to the child martyr Emmett Till, whose life ran a close parallel to Hunt’s until he was lynched at fourteen while visiting family in Mississippi. Hunt, then nineteen, attended Till’s open-casket funeral. He responded by rendering what he saw in welded steel, making the gruesome memory truly indelible. “Hero’s Head” is one of Hunt’s rare figurative works and, after “Roberts,” the most realistic.
Contrast that with one of Hunt’s final designs: an abstract memorial to Till called “Hero Ascending.” It’s among many Hunt works that simulate perpetual motion, but the direct upward thrust of this piece seems especially exuberant. Viewable as a golden cast-bronze maquette, it will eventually stand, fifteen feet tall in steel, next to the Till home in West Woodlawn. (Hunt lived just blocks away at the time of the Mississippi lynching.) Already a designated National Monument, Till’s house will be restored and expanded to include a museum and cultural center, as well as a garden with the sculpture as its centerpiece.
Juxtaposition of the two Till pieces illustrates the Christian theme of torment, suffering, and death followed by resurrection and redemption. Hunt was well familiar with the old German hymn, “O Sacred Head, Sore Wounded.” J.S. Bach, in his monumental Passions, employed diverse settings of the “sacred head” hymn to heartbreaking effect, and Hunt avidly attended concert performances of those works.
“From the Sea” (1983), Hunt’s second homage to Martin Luther King, draws its title from King’s 1956 sermon, “The Death of Evil Upon the Seashore.” © 2025 The Richard Hunt Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Also on view at Loyola are a pair contrasting homages to Martin Luther King. One was created to mark his 1968 assassination, the other in 1983 to celebrate the national holiday in his honor.
Securing the third Monday in January as MLK day required fifteen years of grassroots effort, with the National Black McDonald’s Operators Association as a key mover. Recognizing that victory, the McDonald’s Corporation commissioned a six-foot-high sculpture for its Oak Brook headquarters, which was later sold to a private collector when McDonald’s moved downtown.
For this occasion Hunt made a welded bronze, “From the Sea,” that combines beauty, power and menace. He drew inspiration from a 1956 sermon of King’s, in which the great preacher evoked the parting of the Red Sea. The sermon’s title was “The Death of Evil Upon the Seashore.”
This Memphis memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King, “I Have Been to the Mountain” (Richard Hunt, 1977), was commissioned by the Mallory Knights charitable organization, members of which are pictured atop the sculpture in the town’s Mid-America Mall. The Knights spent nine years raising money for the piece after King’s 1968 assassination. © 2025 The Richard Hunt Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
The other tribute to King also draws on a sermon: his final one, delivered in Memphis just before his murder. A massive work in dark steel, “I Have Been to the Mountain” stands in a Memphis park, carrying a message of hope. Presciently, King told his audience of sanitation workers that he was unconcerned about death because he’d been “up to the mountain [and] seen the promised land.”
It’s a people-friendly sculpture, as curator Jordan wrote:
“Young people play on ‘Mountain.’ Some climb up and look over. Then they slide down its sloping grade. Its purpose, for this crowd, is as intuitive as a heartbeat. What they see at the top is not a promised land. It is more Memphis. However, making a mountain in Memphis suggests that we can all climb.”
Special thanks to UIC Archivist Leanna Barcelona for her help in researching this article.
“Freedom in Form: Richard Hunt” will be on view at the Loyola University Museum of Art, 820 N. Michigan, from July 11 to November 15.
