Art & Creativity Quote by Martin Puryear

Puryear is quietly detonating a hierarchy. In a single move, he collapses the distance between “building” as practical labor and sculpture as high art, exposing how arbitrary that border can be. The key word is “legitimate” - not “possible,” not “interesting,” but legitimate, as if he’s applying for admission to a club whose rules he didn’t write. That’s the subtext: the art world has long treated craft, carpentry, and architecture-adjacent making as lesser siblings to the supposedly purer conceptual gesture. Puryear answers with a calm refusal to apologize for skill.

The line also clarifies his intent: to fuse impulse with structure. “Art impulse” suggests something intuitive, bodily, almost private; “building” suggests measurement, load, joinery, time. Putting them “together” is not a metaphor so much as a method. His work often reads like it could bear weight, shelter someone, or have been made for use - and that near-functionality is the point. It invites viewers to feel the intelligence of materials and the ethics of making, not just decode an idea.

Context matters: Puryear came up in post-minimalism and conceptualism, when dematerialization was a prestige move. He steers the opposite direction, toward presence, patience, and the dignity of construction. Calling building “a legitimate way to make sculpture” is less an epiphany than a manifesto for an American tradition that runs from Shaker craft to Black vernacular ingenuity: art not as spectacle, but as built conviction.