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. 

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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.

Interior and Exterior Domesticity 

Throughout this half of the gallery, Hayden has installed a number of works that refer to interior and exterior domestic spaces—those areas of private life associated with home and family. Sculptures like the untitled sousaphone/saucepan resting on an oven-like pedestal, or the set of wall-mounted skillets titled Get Together awaiting their turn on the stove, relate to cooking and the sociability of eating. They also evoke the darker connections between American cuisine and the history of slavery in the US: “I think of Southern food as the only real American food,” Hayden has said. “In colonial America, who was in the kitchen? Who was nourishing America? That was enslaved Africans in the kitchen, mostly with cast iron.” 

Some objects suggest leisure, like Heaven, a branch-covered Adirondack chair and side table near the windows facing the garden, or the tool skeleton lounging across an Ikea loveseat titled Laure, named for the 19th-century art model best known as the Black maid in Édouard Manet’s painting Olympia (1863). Pecanocchio, a wooden doll modeled after the sentient fairy tale puppet, Pinocchio, lends an element of childhood imagination and functions as a stand-in for the artist. Hayden has made several versions of Pinocchio puppets in the past, each time using a different type of wood and carving the character’s famous nose at varying lengths to make associations between the color of a person’s skin and how trustworthy they may be perceived to be. Here, the doll is carved from pecan, which has a color Hayden associates with his own complexion, and wears a corduroy jumper and custom white leather shoes, reconstructing an outfit the artist wore in a photograph as a one-year-old (which can be viewed in the Nasher app, along with an image of the Manet painting mentioned above). 

The pencil-covered kitchen table and chairs at the center of this half of the gallery titled Supper recalls a dining set that was ubiquitous in suburban kitchens in the 1990s. “For me it’s a symbol of the American family,” Hayden explains. “As a round table it’s also this idea that everyone has equal access to it. But I wanted to investigate further the idea of family in America. Who is this dream open to? A heterosexual, cisgendered nuclear family composed of a husband and wife with their children. This idea is now in flux, it’s no longer assumed.” Here, Supper’s protruding pencils with the eraser end out prevent anyone from having a seat. Its thorny presence in the gallery provokes feelings of unease or discomfort, while the rubber erasers allude to the erasure of the nuclear family. 

On opposing walls of this imagined interior domestic space, two works refer to tender and carnal moments happening behind closed doors: Made in Heaven features a pair of intertwined tool skeletons hanging from a closet rod, while the drawing titled Force Field arranges pills like the HIV-prophylactic drug Descovy to form the Texas state flag. While there are allusions to queerness within these two works, Hayden has spoken previously about his use of skeletons as a way of blurring distinctions of race, class, sexuality, or gender within his subjects.

High School Days

The works in this half of the gallery reference public spaces frequented by adolescents and teenagers: high school, the gym, and church. Similar to Supper, the kitchen table and chairs at the heart of the “domestic” side of the gallery, the cafeteria table here, titled Cutting Board, features sharpened pencils protruding from its surfaces like thorny barbs. Combining a readymade metal frame with hand-carved fir, the table alludes to the ongoing political debates around free school lunches, shifts in nutritional standards, and the social anxieties of navigating a seat during lunch period. Pencils extend from the table and bench surfaces with the graphite end out, a reminder that any marks left by these utensils can be erased and rewritten. Situated between mirror-clad walls, the table is multiplied into infinity through its many reflections. Though denied physical engagement with Cutting Board due to the many needle-like pencils, viewers become a part of the installation through their reflection in the mirror. 

Hayden provokes similar unease with his installation Blending In, which consists of readymade lockers and a bark-covered football uniform arranged to suggest the inside of a locker room. He frequently covers pieces of clothing with bark to reference what he describes as the “anxieties or pressures about how we appear to others, particularly how we disguise or camouflage ourselves to blend in or feel ‘natural’ within certain social circumstances.” While past examples of Hayden’s bark-covered clothing and accessories have typically focused on luxury goods—a Burberry jacket or Maison Margiela boots, for example—the uniform here shifts away from class or economic status and toward the kind of social cachet achieved through success in athletics. This idea is heightened by the work’s proximity to two basketball hoops installed on either side of the gallery. With its blonde weave-in hair extensions pooling on the floor under its rim, Rapunzel references not only the titular fairy tale, but also the clichéd markers of social validation, signaling that the “blonde trophy wife,” like the princess in the tower, is a reward for those who claim success. On the opposite side of the “court,” Short and Stout comprises the traditional craft technique of basket weaving with a readymade basketball rim and backboard. Conflating the gendered stereotypes often associated with athletics (coded as masculine) and craft (coded as feminine), Hayden offers an alternative that can be both. The title refers to the children’s nursery rhyme, “I’m a Little Teapot,” as well as to body consciousness and the desire to fit into established standards of beauty and masculinity. 

As a pendant to the playground titled Brush situated at the center of the gallery, Happily Ever After, installed near the windows facing the street, presents a children’s playhouse in the design of a church, colliding themes of childhood and religion. With its title borrowing the last three words commonly used to conclude many children’s stories, Happily Ever After implies the overlapping interests and similarities between religious doctrines and fairy tales as vehicles for instilling children with positive virtues and good morals. 

The Nasher Sculpture Center's 2024 exhibitions are made possible by leading support from Frost Bank.  

Hugh Hayden: Homecoming is made possible by leading support from the TACA New Works Fund. Additional support is provided by Lisson Gallery, Dallas Art Fair Foundation, and Howard and Cindy Rachofsky.