CSE Richard Hunt Award

Artist Salvador Jiménez-Flores is the 2023 recipient of the CSE Richard Hunt Award. Click here for more.

Photo: Sandro Miller

$10,000 Prize to be Awarded to Emerging/Mid-Career Artist for Large-scale Public Sculpture

The Chicago Sculpture Exhibit (CSE) is proud to announce the second annual CSE Richard Hunt Award. In recognition of the internationally-heralded artist and Chicago native Richard Hunt, the award will help CSE bring new perspectives and added diversity to the large-scale public art world by offering a $10,000 prize to emerging and/or mid-career sculptors for production of new work.

“I’m very pleased to support Chicago Sculpture Exhibit’s ongoing efforts to broaden the perspectives of public art, and bring those perspectives directly into Chicago neighborhoods,” Hunt said. “The human experience in general is enriched through diversification, but this is particularly true in art, which inspires and elevates us in ways unique to each medium—and unique to each of us as individuals.”

Richard Howard Hunt is an American sculptor with more than 125 sculptures for public display in the United States. His abstract, contemporary sculpture work is notable for its presence in public displays as early as the 1960s, despite social pressures for the obstruction of African-American art at the time. Hunt has received dozens of awards and honorary degrees from institutions around the world and has served on several boards, including the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the International Sculpture Center and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

In 2020, CSE Board President said “We’re thrilled to kick off our 20th anniversary with such an important initiative, and extremely proud to name this special award for Richard Hunt. More than ever, it is critical that our public art be accessible in every way—physically, intellectually and emotionally, and to diversify the voices heard, and perspectives shared, through art.”

CSE acquires and places about 50 sculptures in neighborhoods throughout Chicago–from artists both locally and nationally. An entirely independent not-for-profit, CSE is fully funded through a variety of donations and sponsors, and partners with local community groups and chambers of commerce and public officials. Every year the sculptures are rotated out, with new work installed in May. It is the only such program in the city.