Martin Puryear

Martin Puryear earned his BA in art from The Catholic University of America in 1963. From 1964 to 1966, he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the West African nation of Sierra Leone, where he also learned about the local wood-working and basketry traditions. Puryear continued his studies at the Royal Swedish Academy of Art in Stockholm from 1966 to 1968, and the following year returned to the United States to attend graduate school at Yale University, where he earned his MFA in sculpture in 1971.

Puryear’s work has been the focus of many museum exhibitions, beginning with a 1977 show at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In 2007, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a major retrospective exhibition of the artist's work, which also traveled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Puryear’s work has also been shown in many group exhibitions, including the 1979, 1981 and 1989 Biennial Exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the 20th International São Paulo Bienal in Brazil (1989), where Puryear represented the United States and was awarded the grand prize for best artist; and Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany (1992).

Puryear has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts (1977–78), the Guggenheim Foundation (1983), and the MacArthur Foundation (1989), and is a recipient of the National Medal of Arts (2012). Among his other public commissions are North Cove Pylons (1994) for Battery Park City in New York and That Profile (1999) for the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.