Alexandra Johnson Professor Hooker ARTS 299 17 February 2018 Martin Puryear Martin Puryear, an American artist, is most known for his devotion to traditional craft. Puryear began exploring traditional crafts when he was very young and now progressed to show a complex craft construction and manipulation of pure materials in his sculptures. Working with both wood and bronze as well as other pure materials is known to be a mix of minimalistic logic and traditional ways of making such sculptures. His reductive technique and meditative approach challenges the physical and poetic boundaries of materials. A recurring theme that appears within his sculptures is a hollow mass as well as a solid shape with qualities of uncertainty and emptiness. The …show more content…
His process of creation an be described as reductive, seeking to bring work and material close to its original state and creating equality in each work derived from the maker and act of making (Wiki). The pure and direct imagistic forms born from his use of traditional craft are allusive and poetic, as well as deeply personal. Visually, they bring out the history of objects and the history of their creation, this includes the culture of the artist, race, ritual, and identity. Puryear’s sculpture Ladder for Booker T. Washington, he built a meandering ladder out of jointed ash wood that stands more than thirty-five feet tall (see figure 1). The ladder narrows at the top creating a distorted image or sense of perspective that sets an illusionary goal. Puryear has created this sculpture not because of this size that it upholds but because of the history and aspiration with particular regard to human rights and equality. This ladder that was created alludes to ambition. This sculpture was suspended off the ground representing that this ladder has become impossible to climb. The way that Puryear played with the relationship between the perspective …show more content…
Puryear goes beyond simply remembering those who are invisible or marginalized, a “we” that is pushed to the sidelines; he also enlarges the definition of “we” through his work. The load, is a two wheeled wagon that holds a cage like wooden cube made of an open lattice grid (see figure 2). Inside the lattice grid cube there is white glass with a black circle that may be representing an eyeball. This related to history by showing that maybe this is a prisoner in the back of a wagon maybe it is not, but with Puryear’s use and knowledge of history this could be showing multiple pictures all within one sculpture. The viewers of this piece can peer inside of this lattice grid cube and within the black mirrored “pupil” and see that for a moment they have become the “prisoner” inside the box. In this case, it is as if the giant eyeball has entrapped