Martin Puryear

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We went to the Martin Puryear retrospective at the National Gallery yesterday. He's someone whose work I've always liked but not loved, but seeing the pieces in person was helpful. And also having the time to read titles, read descriptions, put together themes.

Many of his pieces have to do with social justice (like "Ladder for Booker T. Washington" below in two views, which is a tribute to Washington's incremental approach to progress), craftsmanship (his pieces are are handmade, with beautifully smoothed wood pieces carved by hand and fitted together; most are not blocks of wood but thin layers of wood curved and bound together), inequality (pieces that are symmetrical except for pieces at each end in differing dimensions), the slave trade (a huge African mask being carted on a wheelbarrow and surrounded by an enclosing thicket of wood), privacy (a piece called "Self" is bulbous and hollow inside but also opaque), and the play between privacy and transparency (in pieces made with wire partially covered in tar).

Of course, like all sculpture, it's also just about shape. One tar-wire piece was called "Confessional," and the front was like a hobbit-door with peepholes and a handle. You could look inside through to the tarred wire sides, which created a view almost like constellations or a planetarium; a rectangle of the night sky.

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