SFMOMA, Part 20: Floor 2, 1900 to Now. Untitled (Martin Puryear, 1990).
Walk around it. That's the first thing — it's freestanding, at center, and it changes as you move. From one angle it's a black solid, a mass, something sealed. Shift your weight and light leaks through the tar-encrusted wire mesh, and suddenly there's an interior — visible but unreachable, a space you can see into but never enter. Martin Puryear built it from wire mesh, tar, and Douglas fir, seventy inches tall, and he has likened it to a Korean horsehair hat: the gat, the Joseon-dynasty nobleman's headpiece, woven from horsehair into a rigid, transparent lattice. A dark, cylindrical, see-through thing. Mass that is actually mesh. The comparison is precise and strange and perfect — a vessel you wear on your head, a sculpture you can't get inside.
The artist's own words, from SFMOMA's label: "I'm interested in mediating between a feeling of massiveness and fragility to reach a point of extreme vulnerability. Wire mesh allows for all of this. It can appear massive and opaque, but [it] is actually a thin veil." That sentence is the entire sculpture. The tar says weight, labor, industry — roofing material, sealant, black and smelling of work. The mesh says the opposite: a veil, a net, something that holds its shape by barely holding together. The fir says the hand — Puryear works wood the way his teachers in Sweden taught him, cut and joined and planed, and the wooden armature inside is the skeleton the veil hangs on. Fisher Collection, acquired by the family in 2008. On Floor 2, at center, where you have to walk around it and the light keeps changing.
Puryear is the most decorated living American sculptor by any honest count — MacArthur (1989), São Paulo Bienal Grand Prize (1989), National Medal of Arts from Obama (2011), the U.S. pavilion at Venice (2019) — and the least interested in acting like it. He lives in upstate New York and makes his work largely with his own hands. The verbs, as Robert Storr enumerated them: "cut, sawed, fitted, joined, laminated, chiselled, turned, planed, sanded, rubbed, burnished and woven." Where Serra conceives a form and has it fabricated, Puryear walks into the woods, fells the tree, dries the wood, shapes it with hand tools. A seventy-inch mesh-and-tar sculpture built this way is months of labor. The meditative accumulation is the work's invisible content. "There's a narrative in the fabrication of things," he says, "which to me is fascinating."
The vessel
Puryear's favorite form, he told Art21, is the hollow mass — "a solid shape emanating qualities of uncertainty and emptiness." His sculpture is full of them: vessels, baskets, hats, huts, Phrygian caps. Forms that hold, or that look like they should hold, but don't — or hold only air, or hold something you can't reach. Untitled (1990) is the hollow mass at its most literal: an interior rendered visible-but-inaccessible by tar and light. You can see in. You can't get in. The sculpture performs the exact condition of looking at sculpture — the desire to enter the object, perpetually refused.
The Korean gat comparison opens the piece outward. Nobody knows where Puryear first saw a horsehair hat — the Met, an ethnographic collection, some museum in his youth; the label says he "likened" the work to it, a comparison, not a provenance. But the resonance is structural, not visual. The gat is one of the most technically extreme woven objects in world craft: horsehair woven into a rigid, transparent lattice by master artisans, designated Korean Intangible Cultural Property. For a maker-obsessed artist, invoking it is kinship across craft traditions. The Peace Corps years in Sierra Leone (1964–66) gave him the model: objects that carry ritual function, baskets and bowls made by hand, the vessel as the oldest sculptural idea. The gat is a vessel you wear. Untitled is a vessel you walk around. Both are membranes — mass that breathes.
He is ambivalent about titles — "I think they can close off people's experience of the work if they stop at the name and go no further" — which is why this one is Untitled, and why the gat is a likening rather than a label. The work invites the hat reading, the basket reading, the vessel reading, without settling. The tar invites its own readings — as a Black artist working in a black material, the associations are unavoidable, and Puryear has spent decades refusing to fix them. "I think there are a number of levels at which my work can be dealt with and appreciated," he said in 1978. "It gives me pleasure to feel there's a level that doesn't require knowledge of, or immersion in, the aesthetic of a given time or place." The tar's loadedness is something the viewer carries to the work. The artist's language is about material behavior: massiveness versus fragility, opacity versus transparency. The veil, not the symbol.
The fork
Puryear studied with Serra and Morris at Yale (MFA 1971), learned minimalism at the moment of its formation, and took the most consequential fork in American sculpture: he kept the formal discipline and replaced industrial fabrication with handcraft. Serra went to weathering steel. Puryear went to joinery and tar. The difference is philosophical before it's material — it's about whether the artist's body is in the work or administrating it from above.
The post-minimalist lineage runs through Eva Hesse — her latex-and-cord nets are the closest ancestor for a sculpture performing vulnerability as its subject; Puryear's "thin veil" language practically describes her material poetics — and through Ruth Asawa, whose crocheted wire sculptures are the San Francisco precedent for mesh as membrane, drawing in space. Untitled (1990) belongs in that line: the wire as line, the tar as shadow, the interior as the thing the line encloses but can't hold.
It was made in 1990, the year after the São Paulo Grand Prize, at the height of institutional arrival — the Art Institute of Chicago survey followed in 1991. The tar-and-mesh pieces form a distinct late-80s chapter: Maroon (1987–88), the thirty-foot skeletal cone of reeds and tar-covered mesh at Donald Young in 1987, and later the tar-coated Confessional (1996–2000) — a body and a booth at once. Tar as the material of confession: sealed interiors made visible-but-inaccessible. The rhyme is almost too good. Almost.
So here's the thesis: Untitled is a sculpture about the exact distance between seeing and touching. The mesh lets light through but not the hand. The interior is visible but not enterable. The veil promises and refuses in the same gesture — massiveness and fragility, opacity and transparency, the vessel and the void. Puryear spent months building it by hand so that you could walk around it in thirty seconds and feel, in your body, the oldest sculptural paradox: the hollow mass, the solid that isn't. "It can appear massive and opaque, but [it] is actually a thin veil." Everything you need to know about sculpture, in one sentence, by the man who still makes it with his hands. 🌁
Timeline — Martin Puryear
1941 — born May 23, Washington, D.C.
1963 — BA, Catholic University of America (switches from biology to art)
1964–66 — Peace Corps, Sierra Leone; African craft traditions
1966–68 — printmaking, Royal Swedish Academy, Stockholm; Scandinavian woodcraft
1971 — MFA in sculpture, Yale (Serra, Morris)
1989 — MacArthur Fellowship; Grand Prize, São Paulo Bienal
1990 — makes Untitled (wire mesh, tar, Douglas fir)
2007–2008 — MoMA retrospective; Fisher family acquires Untitled
2011 — National Medal of Arts, President Obama
2019 — U.S. representative, Venice Biennale (Liberty/Libertà)