Alum Ross Stanton Jordan on Curating Richard Hunt Exhibition

Richard Hunt (BAE 1957, HON 1979) is one of the most prolific public artists in the United States. Over his seven-decade career, the Chicago-born sculptor used his art to explore civil rights struggles in the United States. Still, he’s not a household name—but the exhibition Freedom in Form: Richard Hunt at the Loyola University Museum of Art hopes to change that.

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Courtesy of Loyola University Art Museum

Curated by School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) alum Ross Stanton Jordan (Dual MA 2013), the first posthumous exhibition of Hunt’s work traces 70 years of his career. Through his curation career at SAIC’s exhibitions team and the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, Jordan has organized projects that foreground marginalized voices while reimagining how museums hold space for social history. In 2025, he and two other Hull-House staff members were named Chicagoans of the Year by the Chicago Tribune.

Jordan talked with us about his curation experience that began at SAIC, the political and personal ties behind Freedom in Form, and the ways he hopes this exhibition will continue to cement Hunt’s legacy.

What curatorial choices did you make to reveal the emotional and political weight behind Hunt’s response to Emmett Till?
Because the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum produced the exhibition, I took on the challenge of placing Hunt’s artistic practice in the context of the struggle for freedom in the United States. Lincoln’s assassination was a harbinger of the violence that would be visited to Black communities across the country, often ignored by the federal, state, and local officials to maintain racial caste. Similarly, the racial killing of Emmett Till in 1955, 100 years later, affected Hunt’s own life and art and invigorated the Civil Rights Movement. The most important decision was to open the exhibition with Hero’s Head, Hunt’s response, as a 19-year-old artist, to the racial murder of Emmett Till, Hunt’s neighbor. The first room in the exhibition is designed as a darker space of reflection and reverence, particularly for people still alive today who experienced the killing and its aftermath firsthand. 2025 marks the 70th commemoration.

I also wanted to transport people to Hunt’s studio in the basement of his father’s barbershop, where Hunt created Hero’s Head. I loved the idea that Hunt and his father were working one floor apart. Men in Black barbershops discuss politics, family drama, and share cultural opinions. It is a place where Black men’s lives are taken seriously by each other. I wanted the audience, particularly Black audiences, to pick up on these subtle references to their lived experience.

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Courtesy of Loyola University Art Museum

What does it mean to curate an artist like Hunt, whose work already lives so visibly in the public sphere?
You can see Hunt’s work across the country. But some public works don’t have a marker or have been removed from public view. John Jones (1968–69), Centennial (1969), From the Ground Up (1989), and Steel Garden (2013) were highlights of the exhibition. For any number of reasons, the commissioning institutions removed these works from public view. The exhibition provided a chance to see these public works again and in the context of Hunt's complete art practice. Hunt was the most prolific public sculptor in the country, but he is not a household name, and not as well known in the art and art history fields as his achievements would suggest. I hope Freedom in Form changes the level of his visibility.

Chicago has a long history of socially engaged art. How has your curatorial work influenced the way you think about art as a political and public tool?
Freedom in Form: Richard Hunt has allowed me to work with contemporary art in a presidential library, which was a goal that bubbled up in my head while at SAIC. In school, I developed an interest in presidential libraries, which led to a curatorial initiative I called The Presidential Library Project. The project presented visual, performance, art, and discussions that were designed to lay a participatory, decentralized, speculative, and multi-narrative foundation for the future Obama Presidential Center. This project included over a dozen Beer Summits and an exhibition, The Presidential Library Project: Black Presidential Imaginary at the Hyde Park Art Center. There is an argument that culture is upstream from politics. I like working in the arts and humanities because we get to present narratives to the public that we all must wrestle with and explore.

When you look back on your SAIC years, are there specific lessons or challenges that prepared you for curating projects of this scale?
There are too many lessons to count. I worked in SAIC’s Exhibition department for six years—three as a student and three as a staff member. As a student in that department, I had many thoughtful and hardworking mentors who supported me in taking on more responsibilities. As a staff member, I facilitated student-led exhibitions, curricular exhibitions, and special projects, totaling over 50 exhibitions in three years. I worked with incredible students who brought so much to every exhibition and public program we produced together.  

How do you see Freedom in Form contributing to larger conversations around the role of artists as witnesses to historical violence and change?
Art and artists are often given and take on the difficult task of reflecting and providing means of processing enormous grief and tragedy. After memories fade and people with firsthand experience are gone, artwork must endure and continue the work of commemoration and reflection—an enormous responsibility. I hope Freedom in Form places Richard Hunt among the many artists, through the civil rights and Black Freedom movements, who took up the challenge of creating monuments to our collective humanity in the face of persistent injustice. The exhibition shows that Hunt was an artist whom communities across the country turned to, repeatedly, to help them memorialize and inspire.