Hugh Hayden’s “Home Work” Dismantles the Architecture of the American Dream – Boston Art Review
6 May 2025
In Hugh Hayden’s sculptural practice, the artist carves out his own orientation to the natural world through the uptake of traditional handicrafts to signify the racialized nightmare that built the American Dream. Twenty-foot-long braided basketball nets, a woven rattan basket dyed red with Gatorade, and a Telfar bag bestudded in tree bark are imbued with metaphorical tales linking the present to the past. Each materialized concept functions similarly to a protective hairstyle to both expose and rebuke a national education steeped in horror and omissions. At the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis, Hayden’s installation proclaims a proud heritage that uplifts the significance of foundational Black innovation integral to making the United States a cultural sphere beyond the narrow greed of mere commerce. “Hugh Hayden: Home Work” is the first major museum exhibition in New England for Hayden—just forty-two years old—and it functions as a ten-year mini-survey of an already illustrious career.
The exhibition opens onto an ominous scene: Brier Patch (2018) stages an impromptu classroom (in a section titled Class Distinction specifically created for the Rose) with a set of six plywood schoolhouse desks obscured by sculpted fir tree branches that appear to grow right out of the surfaces, making it impossible to take a seat. On the edges of the “classroom” centered in the Lower Rose Gallery, more uncomfortable desks are pushed into corners. In Finishing School (2023), hairbrush bristles made for tight coils cover the entire surface of a chair while another is fitted with pointy white toilet brush bristles. Brushing our hair, having fresh breath, and cleaning the house before leaving to enter the world is what my mother called “good home training” when we were growing up. But it is not only how one presents themselves in the world—this is another layer of curricula we were taught combining self-respect and safety as one learns to carefully form a character.
In the US, formal and informal modes of education teach and reinforce the stereotype of lower intellectual capacity and hypersexuality specific to Black people. The disgusting methods used to rationalize and maintain dominance include barbaric levels of humiliation to underpin the idea of Black people as lower animals made by the Creator for natural subservience to white people. For example, under the institution of slavery in the US, literacy beyond learning from the excised “Slave Bible” was illegal, and today, biases in hiring practices and destruction of property to undermine passing along generational knowledge and wealth remain common.
Read the full review by Darla Migan for Boston Art Review here.
