*The 1st Saturday of the month is FREE admission at the Nasher Sculpture Center
*Meet at the Baptist Church at 12 PM if you wish to carpool!
Hugh Hayden: Homecoming
September 14, 2024 - January 5, 2025
Best known for his work in the traditions of wood carving and carpentry, Dallas-born, New York-based artist Hugh Hayden builds sculptures and installations that explore the idea of the “American Dream.” Reconstructing familiar things like Adirondack chairs, household furniture, or basketball hoops using wood and other materials, Hayden transforms these signifiers of leisure, family, and athletics into surreal and somewhat sinister objects. Many of his vernacular sculptures are covered in hand-carved thorns or unwieldy branches that imply pain or difficulty to those who try to inhabit them—a metaphor for the fraught pursuit of achievement and status. In other works, Hayden leaves readymade objects intact, only to cover them in tree bark, ultimately concealing recognizable status symbols. Likening bark to both armor and camouflage, Hayden uses it to show how clothing can be similarly deployed as a shield against racial prejudice or as a way of blending in or passing.
For his exhibit at the Nasher, Hayden mined the memories of his upbringing in Dallas to create new sculptures that revel in themes of nostalgia, childhood, education, and religion. While these motifs reoccur throughout much of Hayden’s work, sculptures like Brush — a boar-hair-covered play- ground at the center of the gallery— and the bark-covered football uniform in the installation titled Blending In nearby, have personal resonance for the artist. They refer to Hayden’s own memories of the beloved “Kidsville” playground in the Dallas suburb of Duncanville and the years he played football at Jesuit High School. Despite the specificity of these works and others in the exhibition, they are likewise universally recognizable symbols of youth in the collective memory of Hayden’s generation. The style of playground equipment that Brush embodies—made entirely of wood and evocative of treehouses or Medieval forts—was common in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, before it was replaced by the industrially fabricated metal and plastic equipment that characterizes most playgrounds today. The pencil-covered kitchen table and chairs titled Supper recalls a dining set that was ubiquitous in suburban kitchens in the 1990s, while the Ikea loveseat, here serving as a pedestal for the display of Hayden’s reclining tool skeleton Laure, could be found in most college dorm rooms in the early 2000s. In each instance, he alters these commonplace objects in ways that complicate and subvert their utility and meaning. Through his uncanny sculptures, Hayden shows us the strangeness in the ordinary and articulates his experience of growing up Black in the American South.
Homecoming is a culmination of Hayden’s sculptural vocabulary that he has developed over the past 15 years. Featuring all-new works created specifically for this presentation, it is also the artist’s first solo exhibition in his hometown.
About Kidsville
A key element of Homecoming is Brush, Hayden’s sculptural rendition of the Duncanville, TX playground known as Kidsville. Following the fundraising and construction model championed by Robert Leathers, an artist and architect known as the “guru of contemporary playground design,” Kidsville was entirely imagined, designed, funded, and built by volunteer residents of the Dallas suburb in 1989. The characteristic feature of Leathers’s playground model was the use of unpainted wood as a building material, with a style that evoked treehouses or medieval forts. Over the years, this type of playground architecture has slowly disappeared from parks and schoolyards, to be replaced by the industrially fabricated, metal and plastic equipment that characterizes most playgrounds today (including Duncanville’s, which was updated in April of this year). Hayden’s foregrounding of Kidsville in Homecoming emphasizes the theme of nostalgia that permeates the exhibition. Here, the artist reminisces on the innocence of childhood play and the kind of community engagement that made Kidsville’s construction possible.
Hayden divided the gallery into two distinct halves suggestive of domestic and public spaces using architecture to physically compartmentalize the hall and objects that evoke elements found in the home or school. Centered between these two realms, this sculpture highlights the increasing lack of “third places”—those spaces outside of home, work, or school, that are freely accessible to the public and provide opportunities for socializing in the physical world. Several factors of contemporary life have contributed to the loss of third places: the rise of social media and social-distancing practices left over from the COVID-19 pandemic (which forced the temporary closure of many playgrounds, including Kidsville in 2020) being the most significant. While Hayden centers his example of a third place here, it remains inaccessible. He covered much of Brush with boar hair bristles, a material commonly used in hairbrushes. Strategically applied to areas of the equipment that might otherwise invite engagement—steps, ladders, handrails, or bridges, for example—the bristles subvert any intended use of the playground. Hayden’s application of boar hair also references the kind of grooming rituals occurring in barber shops and hair salons: third places that are historically and culturally significant to Black communities, especially as safe havens to gather, socialize, and discuss politics.