VENICE.- The United States Pavilion at the 58th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, presents new and recent work by Martin Puryear, an artist recognized for a fiercely independent sculptural language ascending from his long-term scrutiny of national and international sources and for an exacting practice that foregrounds technique, materiality, and meaning in sculpture. Organized by Madison Square Park Conservancy, New York; commissioned and curated by Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Deputy Director and Martin Friedman Senior Curator at the Conservancy; and presented by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and the U.S. Mission to Italy, Martin Puryear: Liberty/Libertà meditates on a theme that has remained central to Puryear’s work over the course of his more-than-fifty-year career. Featuring recent sculptures and new works, including a monumental installation in the Pavilion’s forecourt, the exhibition explores ongoing issues related to liberty and its inherent complexities in American and global societies.

This exhibition marks the first time in the history of Biennale Arte that the U.S. Pavilion has been organized by an institution whose visual-art program is focused exclusively on public art. Puryear and Madison Square Park Conservancy previously collaborated on the commission of his monumental public sculpture Big Bling in New York’s Madison Square Park in 2016–17.

Martin Puryear: Liberty/Libertà reflects Puryear’s long-held interest in the power of objects in visual culture and how they are shaped by historical and contemporary contexts. While his vocabulary is distinctly American, his practice incorporates different manifestations of material culture from around the world. Using techniques from international makers, Puryear summons disparate sources of inspiration to create associative content that concentrates elements across cultures, continents, eras, and perspectives. By these means, his work challenges expectations about how everyday forms become sources and symbols that transform perception, inspire individuals, and question history.

“For more than five decades, Martin Puryear has created a body of work distinguished by a complex visual vocabulary and deeply considered meaning. His exacting method and nuance have influenced generations of artists in the U.S. and internationally,” said Rapaport, Deputy Director and Martin Friedman Senior Curator at Madison Square Park Conservancy. “When Puryear learned that he would represent our country at the Venice Biennale, his response was that he would do so both as an artist and as a citizen. This position is not a discovery for those who know Puryear and his sculpture. His enduring approach has galvanized his work throughout his prolific career: issues of democracy, identity, and liberty have long propelled him. Madison Square Park Conservancy is proud to partner with Puryear and bring our expertise and experience as an institution dedicated to public art to the U.S. Pavilion, which provides a critical spotlight on one of the most significant and influential artists working today.”

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Conservancy and Puryear are realizing outreach programs with opportunity youth in the U.S. and Italy through a collaboration between the Studio Institute of Studio in a School, New York, and Istituto Provinciale per l’Infanzia Santa Maria della Pietà, Venice.

Martin Puryear: Liberty/Libertà is funded in part by The Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Mission to Italy and has received lead sponsorship support from Bloomberg Philanthropies.

MARTIN PURYEAR: LIBERTY/LIBERTÀ
For the galleries and forecourt of the U.S. Pavilion, Puryear has created work that ruminates on the theme of liberty and its complicated interpretation and application throughout American and global history. The exhibition begins outside with a major sculptural statement: Swallowed Sun (Monstrance and Volute) (2019), an open-work architectural screen with a flying buttress–like support. The work has been fabricated industrially from the artist’s drawings and maquette.

Upon entering the Pavilion, visitors encounter two works that explore the symbolic properties of headwear, a motif that has fascinated Puryear throughout his career and that runs through the exhibition. The steel visor and crown of Tabernacle (2019) generate an overall form based on a forage cap worn by Union and Confederate infantry during the Civil War. Inside the hat’s outsize crown, the artist has constructed a wood replica of a dissected Civil War–era siege mortar with a mirrored cannonball-like sphere nestled in its barrel. Tabernacle is Puryear’s deliberation on American gun violence, so often enabled through something resembling religious zealotry. Adjacent to this, the lattice-like bronze sculpture Aso Oke (2019) recalls the weave of the eponymous textile and cloth cap that are part of the national dress of Nigerian men, worn throughout West Africa. The cloth caps are donned with the crown flipped to one side over the wearer’s ear, and Puryear’s graceful reference to current vernacular style emanates from the sculpture’s draped stance. The literal translation of the Yoruba term aso oke is “top cloth” or “precious cloth.” Both the cap and the textile itself carry spiritual, ceremonial, and cultural significance and have become for many a manifestation of political independence.

Puryear’s examination of symbols of reverence continues in the next gallery with Cloister-Redoubt or Cloistered Doubt? (2019), a sculpture made of several types of wood. A small, sheltering form is perched on radiating wood beams under a soaring, overarching canopy. The artist has characterized the sculpture as a meditation on the mystery of religious belief and a view of faith as an elaborately constructed edifice—what he describes as a “refuge from reason.”

A Column for Sally Hemings (2019), conceived specifically for the rotunda of the U.S. Pavilion, echoes the four Doric columns at the building’s entry. A shackled cast-iron stake is driven into the top of the column, destabilizing the pristine purity of the column’s classic form. Puryear’s sculpture is dedicated to Sally Hemings, an African American slave owned by Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States. Jefferson was the father of her children. The work takes on additional significance within the U.S. Pavilion, which was designed by the New York architecture firm Delano and Aldrich in 1929–30, during the Great Depression, and was inspired by Monticello, Jefferson’s home and plantation in Virginia. Jefferson, in turn, was influenced by the Renaissance master Andrea Palladio, who looked to ancient Greek sources and worked magnificently in Venice and the Veneto.

In the next gallery, Puryear’s long reckoning with how a utilitarian object can evoke monotonous labor, seasonal ritual, oppression, or emancipation is demonstrated by New Voortrekker (2018), in which a covered wagon is pulled uphill by a vehicle with elliptical wheels. Among the ongoing motifs that have occupied the artist are carts and wagons, conveyances to unknown destinations that can transport riders to freedom or into oppression. The cart is also a sign of the vast contemporary global migration by displaced people. This work is paired with Hibernian Testosterone (2018), a full-scale replica created by the artist of the outsize skull and antlers of the long-extinct great Irish elk. The elk’s “headwear,” in the form of a twelve-foot span of antlers, is believed to have been an evolutionary tool for defense and attracting mates but is now a defunct signifier of masculine physical prowess.

Puryear, in the final gallery of the exhibition, returns to the iconography of the hat and its manifold associated meanings with one of his iconic works, Big Phrygian (2010–14). In this nearly five-foot-tall painted-red-cedar sculpture, Puryear draws on the form of the Phrygian cap, used across cultures and eras—from ancient Dacia to the French Revolution to the Caribbean islands under French colonial rule—to symbolize freedom or the pursuit thereof. In Puryear’s hands, this cultural artifact becomes a wellspring as its meaning shifts and invites interpretation, first from wearer to viewer, and then from artist to audience.

Martin Puryear: Liberty/Libertà features an exhibition design by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, who worked closely with Puryear and Rapaport to create a unified experience of the works on view in the outdoor forecourt and within the galleries. Julia Friedman, Senior Curatorial Manager, and Tom Reidy, Senior Project Manager, both of Madison Square Park Conservancy, have contributed to all aspects of exhibition organization and installation.

Darby English, Carl Darling Buck Professor at the University of Chicago, is the dedicated exhibition scholar and collaborated with Rapaport on text panels and interpretive materials. He also authored an essay in the exhibition catalogue, which includes additional essays by Rapaport; Anne M. Wagner, Class of 1936 Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley; and the cultural writer Tobi Haslett. The catalogue, available in June 2019, is designed by Miko McGinty, Inc., and published by Gregory R. Miller & Co.