studio in his 1950 bedroom, he eventually built a basement studio in his father's barbershop. Education Hunt graduated from Englewood High School in 1953 and entered the School of the Art Institute of Chicago that year. He was once interested in Surrealism where he experimented with the assemblage of broken machine parts and metals from the junkyard such as car bumpers and reshaping them into organic forms. Hunt worked with materials of copper, iron and then to steel and aluminum which led to him to produce a series of "hybrid figures" which were references to human, animal and plant forms. This is where Hunt attains a combination of organic and industrial subject matter in his artwork. Hunt studied at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1953 to 1957, focusing on welding sculptures, but also studying lithography. His earliest works were more figural than his later ones, and usually represented classical themes. Hunt began exhibiting his sculptures nationwide while still a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As a Junior, his piece "Arachne," was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He received a B.A.E. from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1957. European travel Upon graduating, Hunt was awarded the James Nelson Raymond Foreign Travel Fellowship He sails to England on the SS United States and then to Paris, where he leases a car, a Citroën 2CV, for travel to Spain, Italy, and eventually back to Paris. He spent most of his time in Europe in Italy, particularly in Florence, where he learned to cast and create his first sculptures using that technique, in bronze, at the renowned Marinelli foundry. His time abroad solidified his belief that metal was the definitive medium of the twentieth century. Military service During the fall of 1958 Hunt completed his basic training at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. He will go on to serve nearly two years in the United States Army from 1958 to 1960. Hunt serves as an Army illustrator at Brooke Army Medical Center located within Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. While in Texas, Hunt rents a newly constructed house on the base in a neighborhood occupied only by white noncommissioned officers; as the first African American to live there, he desegregates the neighborhood. Desegregation March 7, 1960, Mary Andrews, president of the local youth council of the NAACP, writes letters to