SPRINGFIELD — Chicago sculptor Richard Hunt’s inspiration as an artist was sparked in part by the murder of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old South Side boy who was tortured and lynched during a visit to Mississippi.

Hunt grew up not far from where Till lived and attended Till’s open-casket funeral, which became a catalyst for the social-justice-centered themes that dominated Hunt’s career of some 70 years.

“It was obviously something to respond to,” Hunt, who died a year ago at 88, is quoted as saying on his website.Through April, work by Hunt is on display at Springfield’s Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in an exhibit entitled “Freedom in Form: Richard Hunt.”

Hunt’s sculptures are prominently displayed in museum collections and public spaces around the country. Despite such national recognition, Eric W. Stephenson, the director of Hunt’s Chicago studio in Lincoln Park, said Hunt preferred to work out of Chicago instead of “the perceived art meccas” of New York City and Los Angeles.

“Dealing with industrial materials, Chicago is kind of a haven for public art and resources and, to be fair, accessibility and expense. It’s a little bit cheaper,” said Stephenson, who is also a sculptor. “It was also a way for him to just truly focus on the work and kind of eliminate some of those outside distractions that happened when you’re closer to the center of the art world.”

The Springfield museum’s interest in staging an exhibit of his work goes back a few years. After JB Pritzker became governor in 2019, he and his wife, MK, commissioned one of Hunt’s sculptures, a bronze piece called “Growing Flowing,” for the Governor’s Mansion in Springfield. Later, April 24, 2023, was declared Richard Hunt Day in Illinois.

According to Jon Ott, Hunt’s official biographer, MK Pritzker came up with the idea for Hunt’s work to be showcased at the Lincoln library and museum. Ott also saw parallels between Hunt and the 16th president.

“The pieces that are in that exhibition were specifically chosen to represent these ideas of growth and progression and freedom that define both the life’s work politically of Abraham Lincoln and the idea of Richard Hunt sculpting freedom within the form of metal in an organic way,” said Ott, also a founding member of the Richard Hunt Legacy Foundation.

Born in 1935, Hunt grew up in the Woodlawn and Englewood communities on Chicago’s South Side. His father was a barber and his mother worked as a librarian. Hunt studied at the South Side Community Art Center and the Junior School of the School of The Art Institute of Chicago, according to his website.

Attending the School of the Art Institute, he taught himself how to weld. The Lincoln museum exhibit includes video of an interview with Studs Terkel in the 1960s in which Hunt explains his preference for working with metal, noting that other materials are less adaptable.

“It’s very difficult for me to spend all the amount of time it would take to carve out a form and, you know, then end up not liking it, whereas with the metal it’s possible to change form — to build something up, cut it off with a hacksaw or a cutting torch — and put something else in its place that might relate to the rest of the piece in a much more satisfying way,” Hunt told Terkel.

Stephenson elaborated on the advantages of working with metal and noted Hunt’s use of bronze.

“The beautiful thing about metal as opposed to a variety of other materials is, one, it lasts a long time. I mean, some metals more than others,” Stephenson said. “In particular with bronze, I mean, unless someone goes out of their way to destroy his work, those bronze pieces are going to be around probably at least 10,000 years from now.”

Some of Hunt’s favorite tools are also part of the exhibit. One is a straight peen hammer famously shown with Hunt in a photograph from a 1971 retrospective catalogue from New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, which years earlier had acquired one of his sculptures and given him national recognition. Hunt was the first African American sculptor to have a retrospective at the museum.

Also on display at the Lincoln exhibit are some of Hunt’s other tools: a hefty cross peen hammer; and a ball peen hammer given to Hunt by his father in 1955 when Hunt taught himself the “direct-metal” technique, according to the Lincoln museum.

That was the same year that Hunt, then 19, attended Till’s funeral. The teen’s lynching was the inspiration for Hunt’s sculpture “Hero’s Head,” created the following year.

“I was making something from scraps of metal and then he was brought back to Chicago. We were basically the same age, the two of us. My parents came North through the great migration,” Hunt said of his sculpture, according to his website.

Welded from scrap metal and completed in the basement of Hunt’s father’s barbershop, the work resembles a damaged skull and is described in the Lincoln museum exhibit as “an unflinching portrait of American racism, a memorialization of Hunt’s childhood neighbor, and a monument to a victim of anti-Black violence.”

It’s the first of some two dozen works by Hunt that the public sees upon entering the exhibit in the museum’s Illinois Gallery. Lance Tawzer, the director of exhibits and shows at the library and museum, said “Hero’s Head” was placed in a section of the exhibit the museum created “where the ceiling is lowered to create a sense of intimacy.”

Toward the end of the exhibit is a maquette — a model version of a larger sculpture — called “Hero Ascending.” Hunt completed the model before his death for a monument that will be placed at Till’s childhood home in Woodlawn, which will be the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley House museum and theater.

Tawzer said beginning and ending the exhibit with Hunt’s Till-themed sculptures were mostly part of a collection of works that respond in some way to a theme of freedom — “any of the sculptures that feel like they’re reaching up to the sky.”

“His thought process was that if you can make metal feel like an emotion for expressing yourself and cause a visitor to look at something that has one shape but looks different from different angles, and that’s kind of what he went for,” Tawzer said.

Welded out of chromed steel, Hunt’s 1963 “Winged Fragment” sculpture at the museum was an example of his use of wing-like shapes that “added to the levity and visceral sense of ascension, which is a hallmark of Hunt’s work,” according to the museum exhibit. The piece also demonstrates how chromed steel bumpers were a frequent source of art material for Hunt, who retrieved them from junkyards.

Another piece, “Steel Bloom, Number 1” from 1956, is made from welded steel and depicts rods or rod-like parts pointing upward. The Lincoln museum explained the creation by noting how “industrial fabrication methods, such as threaded rods and machine-drilled holes, are visible in these works.”

Hunt was a voracious reader, and the exhibit displays about 250 books from his collection of about 5,000 volumes, Tawzer said. Among them is 1991’s “There Are No Children Here,” which chronicles the lives of children growing up in a Chicago public housing complex.

Situated in the library portion of the Lincoln facility is a sculpture from Hunt celebrating John Jones, Illinois’ first Black elected official when he served as a Cook County commissioner in the 1800s. At 32, Hunt was commissioned by the state of Illinois to create the sculpture, which is made out of welded aluminum.

The piece is meant to depict Jones burdened by racial injustice with the lower portion of his left leg appearing to be encased and held down by a trapezoid-like block, while another large mass is affixed to his right shoulder as if he’s carrying more weight.

“I made him look as if he is climbing, burdened with weights that are part of him,” Hunt said of the sculpture to Ebony magazine in 1969, according to the Lincoln museum’s book on the exhibit. “They show his struggle.”

The Hunt exhibit at the Lincoln museum opened in October and runs through April 20. The exhibit also will open in May in Chicago at the Loyola University Museum of Art.