JAMES RUSSELL | Contributing Writer
james.journo@gmail.com
Hugh Hayden knows the meaning of a homecoming: The gay, Black artist played football at Jesuit High School in Dallas, and he has experienced the jubilance, social events and dances of the annual homecoming games.
Now based in New York, the artist is experiencing a different type of homecoming. There’s no crowd, no tailgating and no dance, but there is a cafeteria and locker room in his solo show Hugh Hayden: Homecoming.
This show is Hayden’s hometown debut, and it runs through Jan, 5 at the Nasher Sculpture Center.
Hayden’s best known for building critiques of the American Dream. That includes criticizing the inaccessibility to public education, as in his 2022 installation Brier Patch, an ambitious installation in New York’s Madison Square Park of 100 newly-minted school desks assembled into “classrooms,” and his recent commentary on Black masculinity, guns and queer life built around bathroom stalls at Lisson Gallery in Los Angeles.
Hayden is less known for opening up about his personal life.
The title Homecoming, said curator Leigh Arnold, takes on multiple meanings. It refers to the Texas high school pastime of football, his youth and the simple fact it’s his first solo show in Dallas.
“The theme isn’t new to him by any means. But with the objects he’s making, the idea of home typically means safety and where you feel loved and accepted,” Arnold said.
“I’m using the word ‘typically’ because that’s the idea of home that is part of this overarching theme of the American dream,” Arnold added. “What he’s doing is showing how it can be a scary place. For a lot of people, especially LGBTQ people, a home might be a really tragic place for you to be or a place where you don’t feel safe or accepted.”
The show has three structures, which Hayden prefers to call “domestic spaces.” Two interior spaces (a house on one side and school, locker room and chapel on the other) are connected in the center by a reconstructed playground, Kidsville in Duncanville, where he played as a child.
That sculpture, Brush, is made from wood and steel. Unlike the typical playground, it’s surrounded by bristles (boar’s hair). The bristles, and other pointy objects, also poke through a kitchen table and the dreaded lunchroom tables. They represent inaccessibility, whether to education or to freedom.
In the household are, for instance, Made in Heaven, with two headless skeletons dangling from the ceiling embracing each other. Unless you know osteology, you likely don’t know their sex, said Arnold, adding a layer of mystery.
(She even corrected herself when she identified them as him and her.)
Then as a joke and self-reference, there is a small, framed work, Force Field, which looks like a drawing of the Texas flag. Instead, it’s made from the HIV-preventive Descovy, Propecia for hair loss and Zyrtec for allergies.
The most profound example of Hayden’s purpose is a reconstructed Adirondack chair, a feature on many American porches, which faces the large garden where some of the museum’s largest and most well-known sculptures reside.
“The chair is recognizable to me because I had the privilege of growing up in a family that had access to land, but also leisure time,” Arnold said.
And the question of privilege is strongly reinforced as it extends to many museums. To see the show will cost you in terms of money and time.
Yet metaphors aren’t Hayden’s strong point. His work is so full of layers of meaning that you wonder if there is any at all.
Where he excels is form and his use of material.
Hayden studied architecture as an undergraduate at Cornell University and, for a decade, designed storefronts and other commercial properties. He jumped to sculpture and got his MFA at Columbia University, where he studied with conceptual artists like Mark Dion.
He loves wood and experimenting with it and other materials. He retrieves wood, such as disposed Christmas trees, from New York City’s waste disposal department, “Then he scrapes them down to the bare bones as to remove any references to that holiday,” said Arnold.
“He asks what [the wood’s] original purpose was and what could it also be.”
For a sculptor, the process is profound enough.