Martin Puryear

Working in a variety of media, but primarily wood, his reductive technique and meditative approach challenge the physical and poetic boundaries of his materials.

[2][3] Born in 1941 in Washington, DC, Martin Puryear began exploring traditional craft methods in his youth, making tools, boats, musical instruments, and furniture.

[5] After receiving a BA in Fine Art from the Catholic University of America in 1963, Puryear spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Sierra Leone.

[6]: 168–197  From 1966 to 1968, he studied printmaking at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm, returning to the United States to enroll in the graduate program for sculpture at Yale University.

[10][3] The artwork of Martin Puryear is a product of visibly complex craft construction and manipulation of pure material; its forms are combinations of the organic and the geometric.

[12] In 2023, Puryear completed Lookout, his first large-scale sculpture made of brick, at Storm King Art Center in New York's Hudson Valley.

Their meeting resulted in a near-instantaneous collaborative scheme that incorporated the principle of Nubian vaulting, an ancient building method with which Ochsendorf and Puryear were both familiar.