'Hugh Hayden: An Artist with Sharp Edges' - The New York Times

1 September 2024

At Hugh Hayden’s Brooklyn workshop, useless versions of utilitarian things are gestating all around. No chefs could cook with his skillets, punctured by orifices and attached to musical instruments. No basketball players could score points with his nets made of synthetic hair, trailing down dozens of feet like Rapunzel’s tresses. He and his employees implant metal and wooden blades in tables and chairs, and drape barbed wire and prickly vines across baby cradles.

Mr. Hayden, who is Black, gives sardonic titles to his artworks, reflecting how systemic racism has blocked upward mobility for some. His forbiddingly spiky school desk is called “Work-Study.” A wooden ladder sprouting garden shears is “Higher Education.”

During a recent workshop tour, Mr. Hayden, 40, sported eyeglasses trimmed in fir twigs harvested from the Dolomite mountains in Italy. He leafed through piles of raw cotton and vintage books about wicker and rattan furniture, pondering new ways of weaving. Thorny smilax vines were strewed underfoot, and a sandaled reporter, dazzled by the varied work in progress, narrowly avoided goring her toes.

Read the piece in full via The New York Times.

'Hugh Hayden: Homecoming' opens at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas on 14 September.

'Hugh Hayden: Home Work' opens at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts on 18 September.

Photograph by Ahmed Gaber for The New York Times.