DALLAS, Texas (November 13, 2025) – The Nasher Sculpture Center presents its next iteration of Nasher Public, debuting a selection of sculptures by Dallas-born artist Oshay Green. The work will be on view in the Nasher’s Public Gallery, free of admission, through February 1, 2026.
This new untitled body of work builds on Green’s years-long practice of scrap metal assemblage incorporating discarded industrial material found in Dallas/Fort Worth area salvage yards. Despite his skill as a welder and metalworker, the assemblages at the Nasher are manually stacked into columns and secured only with the force of gravity, their precarity an ominous suggestion of their potential collapse. As the construction of the sculptures is limited by the artist’s own physical ability, their dimensions echo the scale of a human body. Presented together as a group of six units on a single platform, the works form a community of anthropomorphic entities.
Green’s totems are objects of unspecified origin and function, chosen from the least expensive stock available; as most of the sculptures are cast iron, it is almost impossible to weld their parts together or to significantly alter them. Their lack of adaptability evokes a long history of technology and obsolescence.
Though their material qualities echo the contemporary practice of artists salvaging industrial and consumer waste, Green’s sculptures strongly recall mid-20th-century Modernist sculpture as well as prehistoric forms of art-making. Louise Bourgeois’s early autobiographical carved-wood “Personages”; Thaddeus Mosely’s jazz-inspired totems made from fallen trees foraged around Pennsylvania; Isamu Noguchi’s self-supporting constructions as well as later works in rough-hewn stone; and most importantly for Green, Constantin Brancusi’s vertiginous Endless Column are all invoked through the formal qualities and methodologies of Green’s cairns. Similarly, many modernist sculptors, including Brancusi, looked back towards Neolithic monuments that predate hand-sculpting and casting, and were made with local materials using the forces of human strength, weight, and balance. Green’s totems almost alchemically leverage the density and heaviness of their materials to produce the sensation of verticality and lightness, acting like a mirror to the viewer’s own body.
Green was initially a sound engineer, and these cairns were erected improvisationally, through an intuitive series of sequential ‘moves’. The artist compares this process to building a looping music track with a MIDI sequencer, a tool used to separate audio into distinct channels that can be layered, edited, and rearranged. Given its particular character and balance, each element was chosen in reaction to the previous one on the stack to achieve the proper height and proportion. Viewed together, the works have a choreographic rhythm. Hanging on the wall alongside his sculptures is a musical score for a four-piece drum set that can be performed with any available materials and a set of instructions given by Green: “REPEAT / LOOP / FIND YOUR GROOVE / SET YOUR OWN TEMPO.”
This is the second presentation by Oshay Green as part of Nasher Public. From 2021-22, Green installed Mundane Egg, a welded-steel mandorla containing pieces of obsidian, outside The Power Station in Dallas’s Fair Park neighborhood.
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About Oshay Green
Oshay Green (b.1994, Dallas) is a self-taught artist whose work develops through improvisation, sequence, and rhythm. He works with a variety of materials to explore how matter carries resonance–how forms, like sounds, move between presence and absence. Each piece unfolds through a process of transformation and response, where one gesture determines the next. By transmuting elements, Green blurs the boundary between structure and perception. Familiar forms take on new, uncertain qualities through subtle shifts in tone, balance, and proportion. Guided by repetition and intuition, Green creates works that exist between object and echo–exploring how memory, perception, and frequency intersect within material experience. His work is represented by Dvir Gallery in Paris and Ramiken in New York, and has been exhibited at CLEARING, Los Angeles (2024), Blinkers, Winnipeg (2022), The Power Station, Dallas, as part of Nasher Public (2021-22), and the Dallas Museum of Art (2020).