HUGH HAYDEN: AMERICAN VERNACULAR

Brier Patch on view in The Way Field (trail opening behind The Way)

Laumeier Sculpture Park is proud to announce American Vernacular, Hugh Hayden’s first Midwest solo presentation exploring a decade of his work in a variety of mediums including newly commissioned works. The exhibition will be on view February 10 through May 12, 2024, in the Aronson Fine Arts Center’s Whitaker Foundation Gallery and in the Outdoor Galleries, near The Way Field. This exhibition was organized by deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in consultation with Laumeier and will debut at Laumeier before its presentation at any other U.S. venue.

Hayden’s vision draws from his personal memory and experience as an American and African American, born and raised in Texas. Growing up Black and gay in the South, and later training and working for a decade as an architect before becoming an artist, Hayden’s work merges organic materials with built space, and draws on folk and fine art vocabularies to capture various aspects of the artist’s personal biography and lived experiences.

Hayden often takes forms from everyday objects and reconstructs them, creating sculptures out of wood and other natural materials that become proxies for critical cultural issues. He draws inspiration from a wide variety of sources, including popular culture, traditional crafts, and storytelling traditions. Hayden’s artworks also engage with unseen threats of domestic life or the ideals and inequities that cut across racial lines in the U.S. The artist often grapples with an uncomfortable reckoning between the promise of the American Dream, the persistence of “bootstrap” ideology and the myth making around progress. He also examines the tensions between the enticing lure of social aspiration and the hard realities of inequity. The artist has stated, “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 artworks presented in American Vernacular generally refer to distinct types of public and private spaces and feature the artist’s take on the trappings of these locations. For example, sculptures made from cast iron pans evoke home kitchens, elaborately decorated basketball backboards and hoops and helmets suggest sports fields and courts, and a row of church pews facing a neon “altar” evokes places of worship. Many works show Hayden’s embrace of the Surrealist approach of combining materials that would not ordinarily be merged, to create unexpected or even jarring sights, such as covering a cap or handbag in tree bark or weaving a basketball hoop out of hair.

Outdoors, in a wooded area selected by the artist, Hayden has evoked the space of a schoolroom with a selection from the installation Brier Patch. Sixteen traditional wooden schoolhouse seat/desk combinations are arranged into four rows, as we would expect to find them in a classroom. But their surfaces unexpectedly erupt into an impenetrable tangle of tree branches. In this work, Hayden suggests that the educational system that is supposed to serve and nurture all children may in fact be scarier and harder to navigate for some. Brier Patch debuted at Laumeier in early November 2023, in advance of the rest of the exhibition.

Hugh Hayden: American Vernacular was organized by Sarah Montross, Chief Curator, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, The Trustees, Lincoln, MA, in partnership with Dana Turkovic, Curator, Laumeier Sculpture Park. Brier Patch was commissioned by Madison Square Park Conservancy, New York where it was first exhibited.

Artist Biography

Hugh Hayden was born in Dallas, Texas in 1983 and lives and works in New York City. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University. He has had solo exhibitions at the Madison Square Park Conservancy, The Princeton University Art Museum and White Columns, NY. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including Sculpture Center, New York; Hayward Gallery, London; The Shed, New York; Pilot Projects, Philadelphia; Sundance Film Festival, Park City, UT; MoMA PS1, Rockaway Beach, New York; Socrates Sculpture Park, New York; and Abrons Art Center, New York, among others. He is the recipient of residencies at Glenfiddich in Dufftown, Scotland, Socrates Sculpture Park, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

Laumeier Sculpture Park’s ongoing operations and programs are generously supported by St. Louis County Parks; with support from the Regional Arts Commission; Missouri Arts Council, a state agency; among other corporations, foundations, individual donors and members.

2024 Exhibitions are supported by Whitaker Foundation, Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, Ken and Nancy Kranzberg, Joan and Mitchell Markow and Two Sister’s Foundation, Emily Rauh Pulitzer, and Mary Ann and Andy Srenco.

Additional support for Hugh Hayden: American Vernacular is provided by Theodore and Heather Karatz and Lisson Gallery.