Martin Puryear: Nexus

Puryear's sculpture from the early 1960s on, set with prints, drawings and documentation of the outdoor commissions, including work not publicly shown for decades. Made with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; travels on to the High Museum in Atlanta.

This is the first substantial survey of Martin Puryear in nearly two decades, and it gathers around fifty works spanning a career that begins in the early 1960s. A twenty-year gap between surveys of a living artist of this standing is itself worth recording, and the show's own scope explains part of it: to assemble fifty works it reaches back to the early 1960s and brings out sculptures that have not been publicly exhibited in decades.

It was co-organised by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Cleveland Museum of Art, with a curatorial team spread across three institutions - Emily Liebert and Gabriella Shypula in Cleveland, Ian Alteveer and Daisy Alejandre at the MFA, Reto Thuring, formerly of the MFA and now in Winterthur, and Michael Rooks at the High Museum, where the show finishes. The catalogue is published by Cleveland and distributed by Yale University Press, with essays by Rizvana Bradley, Joan Kee, Emily Liebert, Michelle Millar Fisher and Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi, and previously unpublished archival material.

One practical note that overrides everything else on this page: the Cleveland showing closes on 9 August 2026. If you are reading this when it was written, that is two days.

The show is organised around material rather than chronology alone: sculpture in wood, leather, glass, marble and metal, alongside drawings and prints that are rarely shown. Puryear uses a wide range of materials and keeps returning to wood, and the survey format lets a visitor watch what he does with cedar and poplar change across sixty years.

What the materials carry is the point. The MFA's Ian Alteveer described the range of traditions Puryear draws on - African architecture and artefacts, Scandinavian woodworking, basket weaving, shipbuilding, barrel making - and all of those are techniques for bending and joining, which is exactly what the sculptures do. The curves and the latticework are not stylistic preferences; they are what those crafts produce.

The clearest case is Some Lines for Jim Beckwourth, a row of worked rawhide strips set out like a line of music or a paragraph of text. Beckwourth was born into slavery in Virginia in 1798 and became a trapper, rancher and entrepreneur in the American West. Puryear cleaned, dried and worked the rawhide himself, by the methods Beckwourth would have used on the move. The material is the biography.

The natural world runs through the exhibition and birds run through it in particular. Falcons recur across the works, and there is a specific source: Puryear has long been drawn to the gyrfalcon, and keeps in his studio a reproduction of a Mughal miniature of 1619 - in the MFA's own collection - showing a falcon being presented to a Mughal emperor.

In Boston that let the museum hang a living artist against its own holdings and show the line running between them, which the MFA's contemporary department has said it wants to keep doing. Cleveland cannot make the same connection with the same object, and that is a real difference between the two showings of what is nominally the same exhibition - a touring survey is not identical from city to city, and the local collection it is read against is part of what a visitor sees.

The exhibition includes works on paper deliberately: preparatory drawings hung with the finished sculptures, and more abstract etchings and aquatints, including Karintha of 2000, a woodcut on Kitakata paper from the suite made for Jean Toomer's Cane. Seeing the loop drawn on a sheet next to the same loop bent in cedar is the argument for putting them together.

The reviewer's and the curator's shared warning is worth repeating on a page like this one, which is mostly words. Alteveer put it plainly: viewing Puryear's work is physical, you have to walk around it and see the forms and textures in person, and reproductions do not do the objects justice. This is a survey whose central claim - that craftsmanship in a specific material carries specific history - is not fully legible in a photograph. Which is also why our own page carries a picture of the museum rather than of the sculpture: we do not publish an exhibition's press photographs, and no free-licensed photograph of this installation exists that we could verify.

Coverage of the tour has been admiring and has concentrated on craftsmanship and on the histories carried by Puryear's materials rather than on the curating, with reviewers and curators alike insisting that the work cannot be judged from reproductions.