A wooden playground looms tall in the entrance of Hugh Hayden’s new show at the Nasher Sculpture Center. Dark, prickly bristles engulf the steps of the structure and its slide. It is a playground that cannot be played with.
The piece, called Brush, was inspired by a playground in Duncanville, where Hayden grew up. The Dallas-born, Brooklyn-based sculptor didn’t visit Kidsville often as a child, but car rides through the area reminded him of its presence. Made of wood, Hayden’s primary medium, the playground represents a “thing of the past,” he says.
It’s fitting, then, that Brush forms the entry point to “Homecoming,” Hayden’s first solo exhibition in Dallas. Comprising over a dozen works, the show blends childhood memories with present-day critiques of American society.
In recent years, Hayden, 40, has become a darling of the art world, with his work featured in solo and group shows in this country and abroad. His art was previously seen in the Dallas-Fort Worth area as part of the Amon Carter’s 2023 Emancipation exhibition.
Hayden was exposed to art through Dallas ISD’s talented and gifted programs and his high school, Dallas’ Jesuit College Preparatory School. As an eighth grader, he visited the Dallas Museum of Art every Wednesday.
“At that time, art wasn’t a career path,” he says during a recent walkthrough of his Nasher show. “While we were looking at art, all the artists were dead.”
He studied architecture at Cornell, graduating in 2007. It wasn’t until a few years later that he began to see art as a viable career path, after meeting the artist Derrick Adams.
“All my friends were architects or investment bankers or lawyers or doctors,” he says. “He was the first person I met that was a full-time artist — and a Black man, too.”
After being laid off from his architecture job in the wake of the Great Recession, Hayden started to make visual artworks and apply to residencies. He later completed an MFA at Columbia.
Leigh Arnold, the curator of “Homecoming,” describes his work as taking vernacular, easily recognizable objects and transforming them in ways that subvert their intended use.
“It’s going to cause you some pain if you actually try to engage with those things,” she says, referring to pieces like Brush and Heaven, where branches of wood poke out from the arms of an Adirondack chair. Another example, Cutting Board, has red-tipped pencils jutting out from a cafeteria lunch table.
The American Dream and its contradictions — how social mobility proves elusive for many — is at the heart of these works, Hayden says. The branches, thorns and jagged points help illustrate how “America is seductive, but a difficult place to inhabit.”
Other works in the exhibition are less prickly, but they still take on American society — and more specifically, Texas culture — as their theme.
In Force Field, pills arranged by color compose a makeshift “drawing” of the Texas flag. The pills, which Hayden takes, are Zyrtec (an antihistamine), Propecia (a hair-loss treatment) and Descovy (an HIV preventative). Put together, they’re meant to represent what it means to be a middle-aged, queer man from Texas, Hayden says.
Blending In consists of lockers and a bark-covered football uniform that allude to Hayden’s stint in the sport. “It’s obligatory for a boy in Texas to play football,” he says, comparing the gear to a form of camouflage. “I was this big guy and they were like, ‘Oh, you should be an offensive lineman.’” He ended up quitting his high school team after a year and a half.
Halfway through the interview, two Nasher employees hand Hayden a homecoming mum with black and yellow ribbons that he pins onto his shirt. The Nasher show, he says, reminds him of the fanfare around homecoming week in Texas.
“You’re returning to your birthplace after you’ve been away. Returning home to be celebrated.”
Details
Continues through Jan. 5 at the Nasher Sculpture Center. $5 for students and $10 for adults. nashersculpturecenter.org.
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