WALTHAM, MASS.- The Rose Art Museum presents Hugh Hayden: Home Work, on view through June 1, 2025. The exhibition is Hayden’s first in New England, focusing on the artist’s extensive body of work created over the last decade, including new work and a bold, site-responsive installation conceived especially for the Rose Art Museum. Co-curated by Dr. Gannit Ankori, Henry and Lois Foster Director and Chief Curator of the Rose Art Museum and Professor of Fine Arts and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University, and Dr. Sarah Montross, Chief Curator of the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, The Trustees, Home Work highlights the artist’s critical exploration of the “American Dream.” The artist himself has said: ‘All of my work is about the American dream, whether it’s a table that’s hard to sit at or a thorny school desk. It’s a dream that is seductive but difficult to inhabit.’
The first-ever monograph on American artist Hugh Hayden, whose sculptures are known for their engagement with notions of class, race, and cultural assimilation, as well as the construction of nature.
“Through his prodigious artistic practice, Hayden has established himself as a leading artist of his generation, and the Rose is thrilled to showcase this monumental survey of his work,” Ankori explains. “Hayden’s unique, meticulously crafted sculptures and moving installations evoke poignant reflections and visceral responses pertaining to the human condition within a complex, volatile, and often threatening world. Alongside its universal significance, his art resonates with cultural specificity, responding to the artist’s communities, cultural histories, and identities. The works are brilliantly multifaceted, alluding to myriad topics, including American history and culture, fairy tales, vernacular architecture, education, ecology, surrealism, race, and gender.”
The exhibition, which takes over 7,000 square feet of the museum’s gallery space, is divided into five interrelated sections: ‘Class Distinction,’ ‘The Uncanny Home,’ ‘Soul Food,’ ‘Playing the Field,’ and ‘Skeletons in the Closet.’ The section ‘Class Distinction’’ conceptualized explicitly for the Rose, transforms the museum’s Lower Rose Gallery into an otherworldly classroom. For this installation, the artist assembled individual and variously crafted school desks around the six desks that comprise Brier Patch (2018). New works from 2024, titled Work Study and Walden, join the reconfigured desks to create an eerie place of learning that interrogates the promises and barriers related to higher education. A dysfunctional ladder with rungs obstructed by sharp garden shears forms the basis for another new work titled Higher Education that will debut at the Rose this fall.
Many artworks in Home Work closely align with Freud’s concept of the unheimlich, evoking experiences that transform the domestic and quotidian into a strange, disorienting, and threatening terrain. Exemplifying this Freudian concept is Hayden’s 2019 work Hedges. This large-scale installation features a model of an archetypal suburban home. Rather than associating the domestic with safety and security, Hayden transforms the familiar abode into a menacing place where innumerable branches sprout from the structure’s walls, windows, and roof. Hedges is experienced within a mirrored chamber, creating an ‘infinity effect' that multiplies the viewer’s reflections amid the unsettling environment. While referencing the subconscious, the work also speaks to the social inequities that keep many from buying their own home, thus achieving a vital aspect of the “American Dream.”
Other works include High Cotton (2015–2020) and Fruity (2021). High Cotton is composed of a wooden armoire, which is, in fact, a claw machine, typically encountered at a grocery store or arcade. Like Hedges, Hayden outfits this benign armoire-turned-arcade game with a mirror, creating an endless connection to America’s dark past. Instead of picking a prize, visitors pick cotton—the quintessential act of slave labor in America. With Fruity, Hayden conflates tedious domestic handiwork, often associated with femininity, with the masculine bravado of athletics by weaving pink Gatorade-dyed rattan into a basketball hoop. Works like Fruity explore and materialize the artist’s queerness, discomfort, and uneasiness with hypermasculinity related to sports and his fairytale-like aspirations of being a professional athlete.
The artist’s training as an architect and upbringing in Texas influenced his unique approach to art. He strongly emphasizes utilizing organic materials and blends diverse cultural influences to create intricate composite forms that serve as metaphors for human existence and social dynamics. By repurposing discarded wood and other objects with rich histories, Hayden challenges viewers to reflect on their place in a constantly evolving ecosystem and consider the interconnectedness of nature and culture in their lives.
“Hayden’s work expresses psychological impact through scale, methods of illusion, doubling, and distortion. His practice suggests a collapse between self-taught and fine art training while also prioritizing visual culture, vibrant music, and culinary traditions of the African diaspora,” explained Montross, who, in addition to co-curating Home Work with Ankori, edited the publication Hugh Hayden: American Vernacular, published by the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, The Trustees, with MIT Press in 2023. “Particularly through his woodworking, Hayden taps into border conversations about craft, labor, and the gendered racialized values assigned to materials and methods within the art world and beyond.”
Hugh Hayden (b. Dallas, Texas, 1983) lives and works in New York City. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University. Recent solo exhibitions include Boogey Men at the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Miami, FL, which traveled to the Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, TX; Hugh Hayden: Creation Myths, Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; and Hugh Hayden, White Columns, New York, NY. Recent group exhibitions include Forest of Dreams: Contemporary Tree Sculpture, Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, MI (2023), and NGV Triennial, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (2023). Hayden holds positions on advisory councils at Columbia University School of the Arts, Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, and Cornell College of Architecture Art and Planning. His work is part of public collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY, USA; Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Miami, FL, USA; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; Smart Museum, Chicago, IL and more.
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