In front of a work by Martin Puryear, it is difficult to separate the craft from the art; the two are fully intertwined in his practice. I have usually been more interested in his forms than in his materials—the loops, arcs; sloping, bending, and climbing monuments; gates; the abstract shapes that vaguely suggest material culture and histories tied to the African American experience without being fully within it. He is a subtle artis—and a generous one—imbuing his work with an openness that is in fact quite difficult to achieve. But something else struck me at “Martin Puryear: Nexus” at the Cleveland Museum of Art (now in route to Atlanta’s High Museum of Art), distinct from an appreciation of the forms alone. The craftsmanship of these objects offers itself as more than technical skill with materials and tools. It reads now as a form of resistance—or at least as a question, and an urgent one—as we embark on yet another technological transformation that further removes us from the work we produce and consume. Our hands (and our minds, for that matter) have been untethered from our material world.

        The exhibition opened at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and will wrap up its tour at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art. Its curators approached Puryear in 2022, feeling it an apt moment to reintroduce the artist to another generation with a full career survey. 2022 was also, perhaps not unimportantly, the year high-speed 3D printing entered the commercial market and artificial intelligence arrived in the mainstream with large language models and image generators. The earliest works here date from the 1960s; the latest are on display for the first time—several were produced for 58th Venice Biennale in 2019 when Puryear represented the United States. These curators set out to open a post-formalist perspective by highlighting the global aesthetic histories and production techniques that have shaped Puryear’s thinking. The catalogue essays reinforce that approach, moving beyond the forms to the content, the sources, and the ideas behind them. This interest in placing Puryear’s work in dialogue with global art practices started in the 1990s in exhibitions like the Museum of Fine Art Boston’s “Connections: Martin Puryear” (1990). The current exhibition builds on this curatorial impulse, and it is the reason that the show is only being installed in encyclopedic museums—although I wondered why it did not have a run at Chicago’s Art Institute as several of the works on paper and one sculpture were from the collection. Puryear had also made Chicago his home for several years, between 1978 to 1990.

        Walking into the first gallery of Puryear’s exhibition in Cleveland, a tension can be felt, manifested through two large-scale works sharing the space. On the far wall, mounted high like a medieval icon painting, hangs Hibernian Testosterone: a cast aluminum Irish elk skull painted white, fixed to an inverted cross of unstained cypress. It is monumental, assertive, looming, a bit impermeable.  

        The Hibernian, or Irish, elk has been extinct for nearly eight thousand years. One theory of its disappearance involves its antlers, which were so elaborately scaled that they may have inhibited the animal’s ability to feed. Hibernian Testosterone is at once a monument to strength and a warning about excess—about the capacity of a system’s own logic to become the instrument of its undoing. We are living through such a moment: a disruption premised on scale and speed that exceeds human capacity, and that promises in exchange for the surrender of our skills and judgment, an abundance we may not be able to use to our benefit. Near the floor, on a low white pedestal, sits Bask: an arched wooden form, dark-stained, its curved surface so smooth and resolved that you want to touch it. Something in Bask—in the quality of attention its making required, now somehow present in the object itself—elicits a more physical form of contact from the viewer.

        The crossing beyond the purely visual is what makes this work matter now in ways it perhaps did not a decade ago. The sculptures are not primarily about their materials either (rattan, cedar, tar, brick, stone, metal) though Puryear works them with a command few artists in any medium achieve. They are about what it means to make something slowly, with the hand, in conversation with a substance that resists and holds to its own rules: craft in the oldest and most demanding sense, not a category of objects but a practice of knowing that lives between a person and what they make.

        Craft resurfaces as resistance with remarkable consistency at precisely the moments when a new technological order promises to make human making obsolete, or radically diminished. John Ruskin argued that industrial production had severed the worker from the meaning of what they made, and that reducing a person to a single repeated gesture in a chain of production was a moral injury. The medieval cathedrals bore the marks of individual hands because efficiency was not valued as an end in itself. Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in 1919 partly in response to an industrial war whose precise horror was that it had brought the logic of mass manufacture to the killing of human beings—the Bauhaus manifesto’s urgent call for architects, sculptors, and painters to return to the crafts reads, a century later, almost like mourning. Mahatma Gandhi, who said Ruskin’s Unto This Last transformed his thinking immediately, recognized that the colonial critique and the craft critique were parallel: empire was an economic system designed to extract value from skilled hands and return dependency in its place. What connects the cathedral, the school, and the spinning wheel is not sentimentality about the handmade but a claim about what is lost when making is separated from meaning, when labor or war enact an abstraction in place of direct physical, intellectual, and emotional connection. Puryear’s own formation belongs to this tradition without being reducible to it. He studied in Sweden with a master craftsman. He learned thatching techniques practiced in Scandinavia, West Africa, and elsewhere. His father repaired things around their home when Puryear was a child in Washington, D.C. These are the sources of a practice that insists on the value of what can only be learned by doing, and on the difference between an object that carries that learning and one that does not. Even if his forms are abstract, their process of manufacture emphatically is not.

        What is being hollowed out now is not the skilled trades but the work of the mind: the friction of thinking recast as a problem to be solved, the slow labor of forming a judgment treated as an inefficiency. The extraction is cognitive rather than manual, but what is taken is the same. A craftsperson working with digital tools makes a model; the data is sent to a machine; the machine executes. Imagination and object are linked by information rather than touch, and what is lost in that circuit is tactile pleasure but also the generative resistance of material.

        Nexus, a nearly perfect circle of Alaskan yellow cedar hanging in the main open space of the Cleveland installation, is marked by a slight irregularity at the joint where the two ends loop back to meet, their connection emphasized in black pigment and gesso. The nexus is the focus of the work: it is where the binding occurs, where the loop becomes a closed circle. A nexus is a connection between two things: in more recent usage, a hub or gathering point. The work enacts both meanings at once. The circle suggests endurance, continuity, self-sufficiency—a closed system that returns to itself. But the marked joint refuses to let it be merely geometric. It insists on the fact of making: two ends brought together by a hand, the seam made visible. The circle is completed, but the labor of its completion is not erased. It is a constructed form, not an ideal one.

        The curatorial argument, signaled by the borrowing of the title of this piece, is that the artist himself is a nexus point—that across sixty years his work has converged histories, experiences, and disciplines (architecture, sculpture, landscape, craft, printmaking, drawing) in a way that suggests at once singularity and multiplicity. A nexus emerges from relationships and stays open-ended, never belonging to a single history or actor. It is not a linear chain or a closed procedure, and it has to be experienced in person.

        Untitled (1982) works through a related problem. Two loops intersect: one a sapling, essentially unworked, brought from nature more or less as found; the other shaped by hand, its surface refined, its ends rendered to suggest a grip, similar to the end of a boat ore. The conversation between them is the work, neither element is dominant. They meet as equals and their entwinement becomes the site of a question about the found and the crafted, nature and humanity. It captures Puryear’s deep understanding of the interplay between nature and art making.

        The wheel, the falcon, the Phrygian cap, the shelter recurs across the galleries, carrying histories of revolution, landscape, construction, and return. They are not illustrations of those histories; the forms have been worn smooth through iteration and repeated making and that accumulation is felt. It is the experience of an object made by a tradition rather than an individual, its meaning deposited over time. Much of the sculpture approaches the status of furniture, whether drawing on vernacular construction in West Africa or East Coast shipbuilding. It is simply there, subtle and humble, and the curators seem to understand this: the galleries leave ample space for the works to breathe. The works employ the language of architecture and design: of openness and restriction, ascent and collapse, dynamics and stasis. The works that Puryear and the curators selected for the exhibition also converse with each other. In Untitled (c.2003), imperfectly drawn lines curve outward from a hard edge, widening before folding back into a form that turns into itself; straight lines then radiate around the resulting shell-like image, dividing the cohesive form into segments. The drawing gives us insight into the wooden sculptures that repeat this folding shape, meticulously built up from spliced layers of wood.

        Bask and Hibernian Testosterone greet visitors on entering while the work that confronts them near the exit was, like Hibernian Testosterone, shown in the American Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale: A Column for Sally Hemings (2019). These two also faced one another in a 2023 installation at Matthew Marks Gallery, documented in the exhibition catalogue–their implications pointing toward the long history of American power and its founders’ attempts to justify their aggressions through the spread of Enlightenment values and classical architecture. A Column for Sally Hemings is almost figural. From the top of a fluted white marble column (the work was originally conceived in painted wood), tapered or cinched as if to suggest a skirt, rises a cast-iron stake with a lock or shackle at its head. Hemings was enslaved by Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, where she bore six of his children; against the invisibility, forced silence, and sexual abuse imposed on enslaved women, the column asserts a stubborn visibility. The confrontation asks its audience to recognize the American story as one that has for too long overlooked its marginal or invisible figures — especially enslaved African American women and their families. Placed near the exit, the work frames the story of American progress, industrialization, and expansion with the underside of that myth: a story imbricated with craft, with the migration of forms, and with survival and making do.

        Puryear’s work is at its best, in my view, outdoors, which is not possible here, although the exhibition provides documentation of the work as set in landscapes, including photographs of Bodark Arc at Governors State University in University Park, Illinois, and two videos on the upper floor showing the restoration of a work in Sweden and the building of a recent project in the Hudson Valley. Meditation in a Beech Wood is installed in the forested sculpture park at Wanås Konst in southern Sweden. It was built with Adam Ooms, a master thatcher whose technique of layering and binding reeds into a weatherproof surface is practiced in Sweden, in West Africa, and elsewhere. That travel is part of what the work is about: the way knowledge migrates across distances and takes root in specific places, carried by people who have given their lives to a trade. Lookout (2023), at Storm King Art Center, likewise inhabits a particular landscape, opening into an interior from which the surroundings can be viewed through ocular perforations in its arched and domed, double-walled brick shell. It too was built with skilled tradespeople, here bricklayers, pushed into new territory with their own materials and processes. A model of Lookout is on view in this exhibition, as is a drawing or plan of it.

        Michelle Millar Fisher’s catalogue essay traces the history that complicates any straightforward rehabilitation of craft as resistance. Booker T. Washington’s promotion of Black technical education, whatever its intentions, served in practice to channel Black labor into existing structures of capitalism, offering vocational training as a substitute for the self-determination Reconstruction had promised and never delivered. The Studio Crafts movement, as Fran Merritt observed in 1972, was composed largely of white makers and hobbyists insulated from the conditions that might have given craft transformative meaning. Gandhi’s wheel has been recuperated into narratives of Hindu nationalism. The history of craft as resistance is also a history of craft as retreat into beautiful making while the conditions for meaningful making are destroyed.

        What Puryear’s practice refuses is the diminished definition of craft both critiques accept: craft as hobby, as identity performance, as a category of tasteful objects for people with the leisure to acquire them. His forms draw on African sculpture and Scandinavian furniture making, on American craft traditions and Russian Constructivism, on the skilled trades and domestic labor. His is a practice that has moved through many traditions by submitting to their demands, accumulating a knowledge embodied rather than appropriated precisely because it passed through individual effort.

        One of the two films that are screened in a small second floor gallery in Cleveland documents Puryear’s return in 2024 to Meditation in a Beech Wood, accompanied by Ooms, who built the work with him nearly thirty years earlier and who said at the time that it was the most challenging project he had ever undertaken. The film moves between the original construction and the recent restoration. Both men are marked by the passage of time. The work is marked by it too: reeds that were golden and smooth when first installed have become silver-grey and shaggier, part of the forest around them. Weather and season have transformed the surface without altering the structure. The form holds even as the material changes.

        Near the end, Ooms gently remarks that this is probably the last time he will restore it. What he made would outlast his ability to care for it; the work he submitted to, thirty years ago in a forest in southern Sweden, had become something larger than either of its makers. Puryear describes his return as a kind of homecoming. Maya Lin, writing in the catalogue, calls the work (which she has visited several times) “one of the most powerful and moving” she has encountered. It carries the duration of its making and its weathering in a way that no description can replicate, because what it carries is not information but presence: specific hands, specific attention, specific time. It is already on its way to becoming part of the forest—the fullest expression of what Puryear’s work was always about, which is not the production of an object but the enactment of a relationship between a maker and a material, a tradition and its inheritor, a human life and the time that exceeds it.

        Ars longa, vita brevis. Ooms knew this; he built accordingly. What he knew about how to make that structure is held in the work now, accessible to whoever stands before it with sufficient patience. That is what is at stake in the argument about craft, and why it is not a nostalgic one. What is lost in the outsourcing of thought, in the replacement of the slow work of knowing with the fast delivery of an answer, is not a style of object or a category of labor. It is a form of presence: the presence of a person in what they make, think, and know. It cannot be optimized, scaled, or generated. It can only be made, slowly, and passed on, while there is still time. Standing in these galleries, I was reminded of Ruskin’s line in the chapter “The Nature of Gothic” from The Stones of Venice: “All things are literally better, lovelier and more beloved for the imperfections…that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.”

Lara Allison is a design historian who teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She was a contributing writer for Art Deco Chicago: Designing Modern America (CADS/Yale, 2018) and is currently working on a book on civic design in Chicago during the twentieth century. She has written art reviews for the Southampton Press and the Chicago Tribune. She is the editor of the Chicago Art Deco Society Magazine.

Martin Puryear: Nexus was recently at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and travels to the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, where it will be on view from September 25, 2026 to January 17, 2027.