NEW YORK • Among sculptor Martin Puryear's best-known works is Ladder For Booker T. Washington (1996), a wood structure that seems to stretch to infinity, suggesting the long - and potentially elusive - climb to success.
But he has gone up another rung himself. Like athletes who make the Olympic team, the selection of an artist to represent the United States at the 58th Venice Biennale next year is a big deal in the arts world.
Now, at a time when museums nationwide are trying to diversify their collections and exhibitions, comes the announcement, for the second time in a row, of an African-American artist: Puryear, 77.
During a 40-year career, he has been acclaimed for large-scale works in wood, stone and metals that display strong craft traditions and explore issues of ethnicity, culture and history.
Shackled (2014), for example, is a black iron sculpture with a metal hoop at the top, reminiscent of the cuffs once used aboard slave ships.
"Martin is one of the most important artists working today," said Ms Brooke Kamin Rapaport, deputy director and senior curator of the Madison Square Park Conservancy, which commissioned and will curate the US Pavilion at the biennale.
"His work confronts contemporary issues and he has by now influenced generations of artists in our country and internationally."
Puryear will create new, site-specific pieces for the pavilion, a Palladian-style 1930 structure, including sculpture for its galleries and an outdoor installation in the forecourt.
The biennale will run from May 11 to Nov 24 next year.
Last year, the US chose Los Angeles abstract painter Mark Bradford to represent the country.
With the involvement of the conservancy, a non-profit organisation that does programming for Madison Square Park in New York, this is said to be the first time the US Pavilion will be organised by an institution focused exclusively on public art.
In 2016, the conservancy and Puryear collaborated on his monumental sculpture Big Bling for that park, a 12.2m-high construction of plywood and chain-link fencing with a gold-leaf shackle.
"People notice great contradiction in that sculpture," Ms Rapaport said. "It was stately and overwhelming and it was rough-hewed and refined and, for an artist who created work out of chain-link fence, it was significant because he chose to use a conventional urban material."
The State Department is contributing a US$250,000 (S$343,000) grant towards the pavilion, as it has in previous years.
The artist is selected by the Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions, a panel of scholars, professors and artists convened by the National Endowment for the Arts.
In conjunction with the pavilion, the conservancy and Puryear will work with underserved youth through Studio In A School in New York and Istituto Santa Maria Della Pieta in Venice.
While African-American artists have historically been overlooked by major art museums, Puryear is one of the exceptions.
In 2007, the Museum of Modern Art organised a retrospective of his work, which travelled to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
In 2015, an exhibition of his lesser-known works on paper opened at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York.
The artist has also been publicly recognised - he received the National Medal of Arts in 2011, the Gold Medal in Sculpture by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2007, a MacArthur Foundation award in 1989 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982.
NYTIMES
