There have been a number of recent Martin Puryear exhibitions: a 2007 sculpture exhibition at MoMA, a 2015 exhibition of his works on paper at the Morgan Library and a 2023 exhibition of his site-specific works at Storm King. These spoke of parts of his entire career; “Nexus,” with more than 50 pieces, now at the Cleveland Museum of Art, is the first to take its sum over time, and it does so very well.
Puryear’s commitment to art—in his earlier decades a bold response to industrial minimalism—is no longer as rare as it was when he started. And it clearly wasn’t some kind of temporary reaction. Since then he has been doing it, but in softer and different ways. Chronology alone provided a new context for considering both the old (some rarely exhibited items from Puryear’s personal collection) and the new (many pieces from the last decade), which is just the beginning of the merits of this retrospective, developed in consultation with the 84-year-old artist.
Puryear’s 1979 episode The Nexus it plays an excellent synecdochical role here, a loop of Alaskan cedar that bows slightly and meets each tip painted in black and white gesso. There are no perfect circles in this world; this one imitates that fact. Alignment is rarely perfect but it does happen. It is one of the few loops or incomplete loops that exist; Night and day a near-semicircle set up by a fence, a frustrated arch roughly divided into black and white sections. It is incomplete and binding.
The loops of Puryear’s work are most evident in the uniquely open arrangement of the works in the exhibition—the system facilitates resonances and connections throughout the expansive gallery spaces. The catalog notes that Puryear often viewed his work as circular, something more complex than any loop, but one that guarantees benefits. Cleveland’s own Alien Huddlethe combined particles of pine and cedar, both similar to the Fibonacci spiral and something like a gastropod, which we know is not really a contradiction, but there are questions here. The most important attraction was the cold molding in the construction, a method that is often used in boat building, using natural wood plastic. Your self it is another work made from cold mahogany and red cedar; it looks like a black stone until one looks closely, and that person appears to be less visible.
Puryear is a woodworker. He will carve wood from time to time but that natural way of most woodcarvers is what he tries to get by; agglomeration of wood is his most common opportunity. The results don’t look like Nevelson or others with similar practices—they often take advantage of wood, which is inanimate but retains, as he often describes, functional, life-like qualities. “It shrinks and swells all the time.” Sometimes he grinds wood in conventional ways, other times he will simply use a branch. Some of his most versatile works combine these elements, finding drama in the interaction. A holy placecreated after a disastrous studio fire, it consists of a humble pine box on top of two green branches connected to a wheel. There is something ironic but also true about the composition of the subject, and the kinetic qualities of the work range far beyond the wheel.
This exhibition and its catalog take a broad look at the key influences in Puryear’s life, from his wanderings to his creativity. His time in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, art school in Stockholm and teaching at Fisk University in Nashville brought new methods and ideas to his work, but the process is often not the same as the subject. He learned to join in Sierra Leone and healed his raw skin in Nashville; these methods were applied to all kinds of different uses when covered by a flood of new ideas over time. Her interest in basket weaving began in Africa and similar fabrics characterize many of her pieces, yet they have significant theoretical influence elsewhere. The catalog notes that Puryear acquired three volumes of drawings by Paolo Uccello to help explain the practice.
He uses a lot of confined space, in different places. A maquette of Big Blinginstalled in Madison Square Park in 2016, it initially suggests a lovable pachyderm made of lined plywood but criticism emerges upon closer inspection. One could not enter it, but it was surrounded by a chain-link fence to make this more clear. Puryear wrote, “I see how you grow and divide and divide.
Puryear’s works involve a lot of social commentary but his mode is not bullhorn. CFAO it’s a complex work: an unpainted pine frame surrounds a structure that resembles a pine face, all placed on an available wheelbarrow. It seems painful until it becomes clear that the title refers to the Compagnie Française de l’Afrique Occidentale, that culture caught in the cage of exploitation. A column by Sally Hemings it’s a work of beauty, and yet the marble skirt-like base serves as a sharp steel pole, a cruel (and worse) use to which Hemings was put.
His comments are often more subtle than that. His gift Some Lines by Jim Beckwourth it is a kind of frieze on the dried skin of an enslaved fur trapper and breeder. There are a variety of images he returns to; Puryear has always been fascinated by birds (he is a falconer) and they recur in his works. Two, with a title In the Tundrawe show the gyrfalcons, one in white marble, the other in black pointed steel. Puryear was corrected by the diversity of their color, a kind that defies the human construction of race.
One of the pieces, The great Phrygianshows a revolutionary chapeau; its form grows elsewhere again and again, in other sculptures and paintings. It’s something that Puryear does over and over again—using a form that’s visible in one area but then using it in more oblique areas in another. Nairy Baghramian cleverly writes in the exhibition’s catalog “his distinctive but familiar visual language in which the references are always original; this allows them to avoid the burden of a precise definition, accepting the possibility of multiple interpretations.” Articles in the catalog repeatedly release a bound page; one acceptable choice is to save several of these quotes, from Maya Lin to Kerry James Marshall, in the show’s trailer.
There are also charcoal, ink and woodcuts, several from Puryear’s personal collection, which are rarely exhibited. There are his woodcuts of Jean Toomer A reed since 2000. There’s a fix for later jobs, too. Shell game from 2014, a mollusk-like squiggle made of tulip poplar, also a nod to the Phrygian cap. It is also combined with another democratic approach to artistic goals: milk paint, often used to finish furniture.
Emily Liebert, 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 catalog, “In all these ways, there is, in the contradictory words and seemingly contradictory quality of Puryear. closed, hard and soft, dark and light—they are in play a dynamic that shows the power of art to rearrange categories and stereotypes.” Remodeling is possible in every imaginable combination at Cleveland galleries.
“Martin Puryear: Nexus” is at the Cleveland Museum of Art through August 9, 2026.
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