Black Americans’ long struggle for justice provides the inspiration for the artist in the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale
AT THE opening of the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale Lewis Eisenberg, America’s ambassador to Italy, stepped up to the microphone. He congratulated Martin Puryear and remarked that the title of his exhibition—“Liberty/ Libertà”— made him think of Ronald Reagan, who had often spoken of freedom.
He won acclaim with his first solo show at the Corcoran Gallery in D.C. in 1977, went on to take the grand prize at the São Paulo Biennial in 1989 and earned the National Medal of the Arts in 2012. In 2007 a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York travelled to Washington, San Francisco and Fort Worth.
In Mr Puryear’s work an everyday object such as a ladder can remind the viewer, unexpectedly, of history. In Venice the neoclassical American pavilion comes with historical baggage of its own: built in 1930, the edifice was inspired by Monticello, the house Thomas Jefferson designed for himself in Virginia. Some artists choose to ignore the architecture, but Mr Puryear engages forcefully with it, creating a work specifically for its central rotunda.
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