At the Museum of Fine Arts, a fluted marble column, perfect in its uniform, scalloped undulations, stands as a serene facsimile of a classical ideal — until, abruptly, it doesn’t: At eye-level, its fluted channels dive inward, down, along an oxidized iron spike stabbed in its center. The thick rusted curve of a shackle tops it off, and its title drives it home: “A Column for Sally Hemings,” a tribute to the woman enslaved at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, who bore him at least six children in secret.
The piece, by the eminent American sculptor Martin Puryear, was conceived for the Venice Biennale in 2019, where Puryear served as the country’s official emissary. The moment was taut with political division, running high along lines of race and class. Puryear, a Black artist by then already five-plus decades into a distinguished career, felt a need to respond. The American Pavilion in Venice, modeled after Monticello, was a place to plant a flag; he put “A Column for Sally Hemings” at its architectural heart, a small central rotunda. It became a blunt avatar for the conflict roiling the country: To get anywhere within the building, you couldn’t avoid it — a nexus through which all had to pass.
Six years later, it arrives here as part of “Nexus,” the biggest survey of Puryear’s work in 20 years, and at a time that makes 2019 seem enlightened. Just this week, President Trump floated quelling dissent by military force. All over the country, the federal government is actively purging whatever mention it can of enslavement from its websites and national parks. National institutions that dare explore darker elements of the country’s history have been targeted for sharp scrutiny over what the administration calls “improper ideologies.”
I don’t know how many they’d find in “Nexus,” the MFA’s moody and austerely gorgeous presentation of more than 50 of Puryear’s works dating to the 1970s. Puryear, who grew up in segregated Washington, D.C., in the 1940s and ’50s, is no stranger to the toxicity of American racial politics. But it’s wrong to consider it a cohesive strain in his work, then or now.
He toggles fluidly between activism and enigma, comfortably at rest in neither. His work less eludes category than specifically defies it. One piece here, “Night and Day,” 1984, a rough arc of wood split white to black at dead center, invites readings of racial tension — a view, curator Ian Alteveer told me recently, that Puryear strenuously rejects. His work is most often stubbornly oblique, slippery to the blunt assignment of singular meaning, It travels in great arcs through art history, culture, politics, religion, and even zoology — sometimes all at once. (James Audubon’s wildlife drawings were a key inspiration, pored over as a child in D.C.)
His career is also dizzyingly elliptical, circling back to re-examine long-ago fascinations. You will not — cannot — divine a cohesive thread, beyond a great joy for form and material, and how it yields (or not) to the hand, because there is none. Puryear walks a tightrope of multifarious intent, inviting interpretation while defying absolutes, toppling only into specificity when he explicitly allows it.
One of those, “Hibernian Testosterone,” 2019, a colossal set of hand-carved antlers fixed to the skull of a now-extinct species of elk, greets you at the exhibition’s front door, a clear critique of hypermasculinity — the elk died out, it’s believed, because its antlers, evolving for battle, eventually became too heavy for the beast to lift its head (also in Venice in 2019; take it as you will). But alongside it, “Bask,” 1976, a slender crescent of pine, stained black and sanded automotive-sheen smooth, is its foil — an object, or so it seems, about being an object, nothing more.
“Nexus,” a collaboration with the Cleveland Museum of Art, is strung along a loose chronology, and can feel almost soothingly conventional: Blond-wood floors, high ceilings, and wide-open spaces that allow the works, most of them human body sized or larger, plenty of space to drift in distant relation to one another.
“Distant” isn’t bad way to think of Puryear’s work more broadly. He’s a master of the formal riddle — an object, like “Bask,” made for its own sake. Let’s name-check, because that’s what art history does: There are clear echoes of Minimalism, the ultra-reductive practice of formal austerity that rose to dominate the art world in the 1960s, a reactive backlash to the excesses of Abstract Expressionism. A giant oblong piece here looks like a boulder of ebony lapped smooth by millennia of gently crashing waves; it’s one of his best-known works, “Self,” from 1978, and the product of meticulous handcraft, assembled from slim wooden planks.
A minimal form born of maximal labor reveals Puryear’s anti-allegiance; he belongs in no-one’s -ism but his own. Resisting category is as much a part of Puryear’s career as the work itself, and he comes by it honestly. After graduation from D.C.’s Catholic University of America — a biology major — he joined the Peace Corps and wound up in West Africa, where in between teaching language and science he learned age-old craft from local artisans.
Woodworking stuck, and many pieces here reflect his lifelong material fluency: “Alien Huddle,” 1993-95, an impossibly perfect fusion of overlapping spheres; an untitled piece from 1992, with a long, tapering tentacle of wood bent carefully into a circle.
A grand swoop of red cedar fixed with a rough lever at its base appears to be pure abstract material joy. But he teases meaning, as he so often does, with its title: “Malediction,” from 2006-7 — in Biblical terms, a curse. It sits uneasily alongside other vague nods to his Catholic upbringing — “Confessional,” 1996-2000, a coarse volume of wire mesh gummed with tar comes with a little wooden doorway to its close interior confines; to just imagine stooping to enter prompts shivers of claustrophobic panic, which seems to say much.
The irresistible tease is to read more, not less. So let’s tie past to present, shall we? An early work, “Rawhide Cone,” 1980, feels like an outlier here — visceral and raw, the brittle skin wound loosely in a pointed form protruding from the wall. It gives nothing away, but feels violent, an aftershock, all the same. Next to it, slim cords of braided rawhide are strung at varying lengths along the wall, punctuated by tufts of fur.
Their title demands more, not less: “Some Lines for Jim Beckwourth,” from 1978, connects it to an action movie-esque figure of the 19th century. Born enslaved in Virginia, Beckwourth’s 1850 memoir recounts a grand arc to freedom and adventure in defiance of his racial identity: Forging westward, he lived with the Crow Indian nation, skinned animals for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, and dabbled in the California gold rush. He also worked for the US Army, for whom he played a role in the massacre of Native Americans to clear a path for white settler expansion, and the meaning in the taut lines and nearby cone deepen, and notably darken.
Maybe Puryear does in fact protest a bit too much. Near “A Column for Sally Hemings,” two other works inflect deeper reading into his staunch ambiguity. “C.F.A.O.,” 2006-7, a weathered wooden wheelbarrow topped with a jenga-like thicket of slim boards, and embedded with a negative relief of a West African mask; and, potently, “Big Phrygian,” 2010-14, an almost comically-outsize wooden effigy of a cartoonish red cap.
“C.F.A.O.” all but shouts precarity, a tumbledown waiting to happen. It’s a fragile vessel for the mask form, unmistakable in its smooth lines and painted ghostly white — an emblem, maybe of a culture exploited and commodified almost to atomization? Maybe. Nearby, “Big Phrygian” — bright, jaunty, playful — carries a heavier load. The Phrygian cap has long been a symbol of liberty: For freed Roman slaves, for the French revolutionaries who toppled the monarchy; it appears on the Haitian Coat of Arms as an emblem of its victory from French colonial oppression.
What does it mean here, now, in the shadow of Sally Hemings and the threat of crumbling of American freedom just outside the door? Puryear may elide direct engagement; his distaste for the conversation is perfectly justifiable, because it’s distasteful. But he’s in it, like the rest of us, and the only way out is through.
MARTIN PURYEAR: NEXUS
At Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 465 Huntington Ave. Through Feb. 8. 617-267-9300,
Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com.