'Hugh Hayden: Homecoming' at Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX, USA

28 August 2024

From 14 September, the Nasher Sculpture Center will present New York-based artist Hugh Hayden's solo exhibition 'Homecoming'.

The show will mine memories from Hayden's childhood in Dallas, nodding to homelife, school, and play from youth to adolescence. As a key component of 'Homecoming', Hayden will create a rendition of a children’s playground covered in thorns carved from the base material. The artist envisions a version of the playground known as 'Kidsville' that was imagined, designed, funded, and built entirely by volunteer residents of the Dallas suburb of Duncanville in 1989. Hayden associates Kidsville with childhood nostalgia for a time when a community came together for the benefit of their children. Constructed entirely of unpainted wood, Hayden’s primary sculptural material, in a style evocative of children’s treehouses or Medieval forts, Kidsville represented the kind of playground architecture that has slowly disappeared from parks and schoolyards, to be replaced by industrially fabricated, colorful, metal and plastic equipment that characterizes most playgrounds today.

Accompanying Hayden’s interpretation of 'Kidsville' will be a series of new sculptures by the artist, using familiar objects with complex cultural backgrounds to create metaphors for human existence and the somewhat fraught pursuit of achievement and status.

On view through 5 January 2025. Find further information via Nasher Sculpture Center.

Image: Hugh Hayden, Supper, 2024, Fir and rubber erasers, 139.7 x 233.7 x 233.7 cm, 55 x 92 x 92 in © Hugh Hayden, courtesy Nasher Sculpture Center. Photography by Kevin Todora.