Artist Hugh Hayden makes football-inspired sculptures at Anderson Ranch

6 January 2021

In December 2020, Hugh Hayden was a Visiting Artist at the non-profit Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, Colorado. Read about his experience and the in the excerpt below, and in full via Aspen Times.

As the bizarre pandemic-contorted college and professional football seasons of 2020 stumbled toward conclusion, the artist Hugh Hayden was holed up at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village exploring the game’s meaning in America.

Hayden is best-known as a woodworker, working with familiar domestic objects like the white picket fence, the picnic table, the kitchen table and finding new meaning in them by adding touches like horns, spikes or weed-like wooden tendrils. He came to the Ranch for a residency this winter to explore a new medium, clay, using the famed campus kilns and studios to begin a football-inspired project he’d been mulling for years.

“The body of work I’m developing here grew out of wanting to continue to explore this masculine fragility,” he explained in the studio, surrounded by his works in progress and buckets of clay mixes. “Especially how it is involved with athletics and football.”

Photo by Roshni Gorur, Courtesy of Anderson Ranch Arts Center.