A Soaring Monument to a New Future

One of the last public sculptures Richard Hunt designed will be placed near the home of Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley and her son Emmett Till in West Woodlawn, Chicago. The house was dilapidated when purchased in 2020 by Blacks in Green, an environmental and economic justice nonprofit. The organization has developed restoration plans that will include a museum and cultural hub. Hunt’s contribution to the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley House Museum is Hero Ascending, a soaring fifteen-foot-tall monument of steel. The cast bronze maquette of Hero Ascending rises out of an angular base and transforms into organic forms reaching out and up. Hunt’s design evokes a bird the moment it is about to take flight, or a blossoming flower about to open, or the spirit of aspiration.

Once completed, the sculpture will add to national efforts to commemorate the legacy of Emmett Till and his mother. The Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument was established by President Joe Biden in 2023 in several locations: Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, where funeral services for Till were held September 3-6, 1955; on the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi at the site where Till’s body was left; and the county courthouse where an all-white jury acquitted the accused.

Hero Ascending completes the work Hunt started in his basement studio nearly seventy years earlier when he created a tribute, Hero’s Head, to grapple with the terror of racism. Now, Hunt is providing us with everything that Hero’s Head did for him. Hero Ascending will be an indelible memorial to those lost to racial violence and provide a soaring monument to a new future.

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