The low building with the courtyard. In the reading garden there's a bronze sculpture of a bird coming up off an open book, and it's called Book Bird.
That's a Richard Hunt. If you don't know the name, you know the work. Hunt put public sculpture all over this city for sixty years. In nineteen seventy-one he became the first Black sculptor to get a solo retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. He was thirty-five.
He grew up on the South Side above his father's barbershop, started welding metal as a teenager, and never really stopped. By the end he had completed more public commissions than any other artist in America. More than any other artist. He bought a derelict electrical substation on the North Side and turned it into a studio, because a normal studio wasn't going to hold what he was making.
Obama picked him personally. Thirty-odd artists ended up making work for this campus. Hunt was the first one commissioned — the first piece of art anybody ordered for this place, before
there was a building to put it in. He said the bird was about what reading does to you: you go in through a book and you come out somewhere else.
Richard Hunt died in twenty twenty-three, at eighty-eight. Book Bird is one of the last monuments he made, and he never saw it installed.
And the thing his bird is sitting outside of is a branch of the Chicago Public Library. An actual one. Free card,
