There have been a number of recent Martin Puryear exhibitions: a 2007 sculpture show at MoMA, a 2015 exhibit of his works on paper at the Morgan Library and a 2023 exhibit on his site-specific works at Storm King. These addressed parts of the whole of his work; “Nexus,” featuring over 50 pieces, now at the Cleveland Museum of Art, is the first to take in its sum in some time, and does so exceptionally well.
Puryear’s devotion to craft—in his earlier decades a bold reaction to industrial minimalism—is no longer as rare a stance as when he started out. It also clearly wasn’t any sort of temporary reaction. He’s kept at it ever since, yet in supple and varying directions. Chronology alone has provided a fresh context for the consideration both of old (some rarely displayed items from Puryear’s personal collection) and new things (multiple pieces from the last decade), which is only the start of the merits of this retrospective, developed in consultation with the 84-year-old artist.
Puryear’s 1979 piece Nexus plays an excellent synecdochical role here, a loop of Alaskan cedar that bows out a bit and meets with each tip painted in black and white gesso. There are no perfect circles in this world; this one dramatizes that fact. Alignment is rarely whole but it does happen. It’s one of several loops or partial loops present; Night and Day is a near-semicircle suspended by wire, a frustrated arch divided into near-halves of black and white. It is imperfect and arresting.
The loops of Puryear’s work are very clear in the exceptionally open arrangement of works in the show—the arrangement makes resonances and connections simple across wide gallery spans. The catalogue notes that Puryear has often regarded his career as a spiral, something yet more complicated than any loop, yet guaranteeing returns. Cleveland’s own Alien Huddle, conjoined spheres of pine and cedar, both resembles a Fibonacci spiral and something gastropod-like, which we know isn’t necessarily a contradiction, but is quizzical here. A vital attraction was cold-molding in its fabrication, a technique most often used in boat-building, making use of the natural plasticity of wood. Self is another work formed from cold-molding mahogany and red cedar; it looks like dark stone until one takes a closer look, and that self appears a bit less opaque.
Puryear is a capital-W woodworker. He will occasionally carve woods but that natural recourse of most wood sculptors is one he ventures well beyond; the agglomeration of wood is his most frequent turn. The results don’t look like Nevelson or others with similar habits—they tend to exploit the possibilities of wood, which isn’t quite alive but retains, as he has frequently explained, lifelike reactive qualities. “It’s shrinking and swelling all the time.” Sometimes he mills wood in conventional ways, sometimes he’ll simply use a branch. Some of his most transfixing works combine these elements, finding drama in the joinery. Sanctuary, created in the aftermath of a disastrous studio fire, features a humble pine box atop two spindly natural sapling branches linked to a wheel. There is something ironic yet also genuine about the titling, and the kinetic qualities of the work stem from far more than the wheel.
The exhibition and its catalogue take a comprehensive look at prime influences in Puryear’s life, from both his geographical and intellectual wanderings. His time in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, art school in Stockholm and teaching at Fisk University in Nashville injected new methods and ideas into his practice, yet technique often doesn’t mirror topicality. He learned joinery in Sierra Leone and cured his own rawhide in Nashville; these methods were put to all sorts of different uses when overlaid with a torrent of new ideas over time. His interest in basket-weaving originated in Africa and similar lattices characterize many of his pieces, yet have prime theoretical influence elsewhere. The catalogue notes Puryear retrieving three volumes on Paolo Uccello’s drawings to help explain the practice.
He makes much use of enclosed space, to quite different ends. A maquette for Big Bling, installed in Madison Square Park in 2016, first suggests a fanciful pachyderm built out of laminated plywood but critique emerges upon closer examination. One couldn’t get in it, but it was wrapped in chain-link fence to make this all the clearer. Puryear wrote, “I see how you grow and compartmentalize and stratify. I see how you beckon and promise (and also how you exclude).”
Puryear’s works involve substantial social commentary yet his mode is not the bullhorn. C.F.A.O. is complex work: an unpainted pine frame surrounds a painted pine face-like structure, all perched on a found wheelbarrow. It seems rather jaunty until it’s clear that the title references the Compagnie Française de l’Afrique Occidentale, that tradition caught up in a cage of exploitation. A Column for Sally Hemings is a work of elegance, and yet a marble skirt-like base acts as pediment for a cast iron hitching post, the brute use (and worse) to which Hemings was put.
His commentary is often more subtle than that. His tribute Some Lines for Jim Beckwourth is a sort of frieze in dried rawhide to an enslaved fur trapper and rancher. There are a variety of images to which he returns; Puryear has always been fascinated by birds (he is a falconer) and they recur in his works. Two, both titled On the Tundra, depict gyrfalcons, one in white marble, one in dark cast iron. Puryear was fixated by the variability of their coloring, a sort of counterpoint to the human construction of race.
One of the pieces, Big Phrygian, depicts the revolutionary chapeau; its form crops up elsewhere repeatedly, in other sculptures and drawings. It’s something Puryear does repeatedly—utilizing a form to some sort of seeming point in one location but then wielding it to more oblique ends elsewhere. Nairy Baghramian writes deftly in the exhibition’s catalogue about his “distinct yet universal visual language in which references remain allusions; this allows them to evade the burden of definitive meaning, embracing the potential for multiple interpretations.” Essays in the catalogue break free of the bound page repeatedly; one welcome curatorial choice is to quote several of these, from Maya Lin to Kerry James Marshall, in exhibition captions.
There are also early charcoal, ink and woodcut drawings, several from Puryear’s personal collection, which have rarely been displayed. There are his woodcut illustrations for Jean Toomer’s Cane from 2000. There are bracing recent works, as well. Shell Game from 2014, a sort of mollusk-like squiggle made of tulip poplar, also vaguely nods to the Phrygian cap. It’s slathered in yet another demotic method put to artistic aims: milk paint, typically used to finish furniture.
Emily Liebert, the Lauren Rich Fine Curator of Contemporary Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art (who co-curated the exhibition with Reto Thüring, Head of Culture at the Foundation for Art, Culture, and History in Winterthur, Switzerland) writes in the exhibition catalogue, “Across these mediums, there is, in Puryear’s words, a ‘flickering quality’ where seemingly stable opposites—open and closed, hard and soft, dark and light—are in dynamic play demonstrating the potential of art to reframe fixed categories and ideas.” Reframing is possible in all combinations imaginable in the Cleveland galleries.
“Martin Puryear: Nexus” is at the Cleveland Museum of Art through August 9, 2026.
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