Richard Hunt's Studio and the Remaking of Lincoln Park

On December 16th, 2023, internationally renowned sculptor Richard Hunt passed away after 88 years of life in Chicago. The next day, shortly after the public learned the news, I made visited the late artist’s studio, hoping to pay respects and to document the building’s exterior in an undisturbed state.

 

 

A graduate of Englewood High School, Hunt grew up attending courses at the South Side Community Art Center in nearby Bronzeville. He pursued a BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he found early advocates who helped him forge connections in the art world. In 1956, at only 21 years old, a small sculpture of Hunt’s was acquired by MoMA in New York City, helping kick off a long and abundant career of private and public commissions that eventually grew to monumental sizes - much of Hunt's work sought to monumentalize aspects of Black Americans' struggles for equal rights and equal treatment. One of only a handful of Black artists to find access to elite art spaces during the middle of the 20th century, Hunt was also championed by landmark Black business and civic figures like George E. Johnson, Sr. and Hobart Taylor, Jr., as well as by well-heeled collectors and gallerists who sought out cutting-edge work from Chicago artists.

 

 

It was that latter category of supporter that led to Hunt’s use of this studio space in Lincoln Park, on the opposite side of town from where he grew up and first crafted working spaces for himself from rooms of his family’s home and his dad’s business, a barbershop. In 1971, the same year that MoMA honored Hunt with his first retrospective exhibition (which was also the first-ever solo retrospective exhibition by a Black American artist at MoMA), Chicago real estate developer and contemporary art patron David C. Ruttenberg  purchased this disused electrical substation from a public auction with intention to resell it to Hunt, providing Hunt with a private mortgage on favorable terms so that the artist could access, control, and shape a building suited to the ever-growing scale of the works he wished to create.

 

Ruttenberg’s role in Chicago’s arts community intersected with his role as a real estate developer. For better or for worse, working artists have tended to be on the vanguard of private real estate interest in changing neighborhoods throughout the last century of U.S. history. Ruttenberg and his business partner, Louis Supera, were partially responsible for the creative scenes that flourished in River North, Old Town, and eventually Lincoln Park through the middle decades of the 1900s, actively recruiting artists to the properties they managed or renovated while carving out spaces for new professional-class residents alongside them. Ruttenberg’s interest in art was genuine and heartfelt: by the time he passed away in 2003 he and his wife had amassed a collection of over 10,000 artworks, helped found the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and stewarded the careers of many notable Chicago artists. But when the neighborhoods that Ruttenberg took an interest in moved upmarket, the arts cachet that Ruttenberg helped instill there generated profits for him and other developers. Now in their third generation as developers, Ruttenberg’s descendants continue to hold significant wealth and exercise significant influence in Chicago real estate circles. The favorable terms of the 1971 sale of this building from Ruttenberg to Hunt, which resulted from a deep personal interest in Hunt’s art and a desire to stabilize the artist’s creative practice, took place during a time that Ruttenberg and Supera were extending their real estate activity into the portions of Lincoln Park west of Halsted Street, often in tension with existing residents.

 

 

Lincoln Park eventually evolved from the contrarian middle class “urban pioneer” landing spot that it was characterized as in the ‘60s and ‘70s (a topic covered in Daniel Kay Hertz’s “The Battle of Lincoln Park”, which mentions Ruttenberg and Supera) into the stratospherically wealthy neighborhood that it is today, at least on blocks like this one that were dominated by single family homes, townhouses, and small multi-unit buildings. The home next door to Richard Hunt’s studio sold for $2.37 million in 2011, and similar homes on the block have recently sold for closer to $2.7 million. Over time, the preferences of ever more wealthy neighbors began to pose challenges for Hunt’s sculpture practice. While many nearby residents celebrated the famous sculptor working right in their backyard, some took issue with piles of scrap metal that accumulated at the rear of the property, the noises they could hear through the building’s walls while fabrication took place inside, and the general condition of the structure, which was less tidily kept than much of its surroundings. By the 2000s, Hunt began receiving building code violations that resulted from complaint-based inspections, and twice he landed in building court as a result of those violations. Even as his international artistic reputation reached height after height, with commissions from institutions like the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Barack Obama Presidential Center, Hunt and his staff struggled to keep up with the old building and to satisfy a subset of neighbors who would rather he not be there at all.

 

 

Hunt continued to work right up until his death, in this studio and at a satellite studio that he owned in Benton Harbor, Michigan between 1995 and mid-2023. The main Lincoln Park studio building, which sits unused for the moment, is owned by the artist’s trust, partially stewarded by business executive and longtime Hunt patron Ken Merlau. Hunt and a network of supporters formed a foundation near the end of his life to steward his legacy, but the foundation is legally separate from the trust. As of yet, no plans have been announced publicly for the future of Hunt’s Lincoln Park studio.