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.
As a result of generations of discrimination in most spheres of commerce, one way that Black Americans have been able to advance financially in integrated society is through the sports arena. In a section of the exhibition titled Playing the Field, two complementary sculptures—The Kiss, two helmets carved in black walnut, pine, and oak, and Crown of Thorns, a football helmet mask welded in steel (both 2020)—resemble pee-wee league football gear, showing how early young boys are introduced to sports training engendering the expectation of high performance on the field. The near-divine sacrifices that Black American families make so that their children may one day be recruited to play professional ball or earn a college scholarship may also build self-esteem, but specifically “in the fields,” where it has already been traditionally sanctioned.
Hayden moves the needle on representative art to go beyond merely signaling through the presentation of objects stereotypically associated with Black life. Curators Dr. Gannit Ankori and Dr. Sarah Montross call attention to the ways in which Hayden deftly conflates domestic or “feminine” work with the “bravado and hypermasculinity of competitive sports.” By uncannily disaggregating gendered assignations, the sculptor, who patiently learned how to braid from online content, upends the roles we were intended to play forever.
Hayden’s handcrafted forms intensify and elevate sports equipment to show reverence for the dreamscape of so many Black youth. But all too often participating in a fantasy of American life affiliates the worthiness of Black existence with Christ’s painful sacrifice. Here, the would-be fairytale hero, like a basketball player magically able to fly up and dunk on 3-Story Rapunzel (2024), may also be punished Icarus-style for flying too close to the sun. But here a dream of rising in society may slip all too easily into a Faustian bargain, one requiring a price far too high to pay (such as the health and well-being of a child) in a contrived game beset by illegitimate rules.
We are all invited to expand our dreams beyond the unfair game of America’s pathological lies that block opportunities for Black people, by taking delight in works like Fairytale (2024), comprised of 24k yellow gold and Descovy pills. Here, the Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) regimen is a twenty-first-century luxury, a powerful new pleasure jewel doubling perfectly in place of two Tiffany-blue stones set in gold. Nearby, in High Cotton (2015–2020), an automated cotton “picker” machine is constructed like an arcade claw game to fit into a Chippendale-style armoire. Looking through the glass, viewers—or players—can peer into mirrors of endlessly repeating rows of the thorny cotton. It’s easy to imagine hundreds of years of cotton picked by ancestors, later spun into fine cloth in other parts of the colonized world. In his own rendition of a “built to last” antique with bright lights and twinkling arcade music, Hayden positions the crop harvested by people who were treated as if they were mere tools (or robots) in plain view for all to witness.
This final gallery is poorly titled Skeletons in the Closet, but it is less a closet than a family vault where treasures, such as granddad’s vintage attire or your mama’s letters to an old boyfriend, might be discovered. Cherished memories and family heirlooms live together alongside pained and shameful pasts. Hayden has a keen way of revealing the shared intimacy happening alongside American horrors—our gothic nineteenth century still spills over into the lives lived in freedom never imagined by our grandparents, with new family expectations and challenges in tow. While imaginatively reconstructing and exposing the underlying, or skeletal, framing of the American family through his architectural expertise, design skills, and tailoring, the artist pushes viewers into the position of temporary props in his own aesthetic theater, but without replicating voyeuristic scenes of Black people in pain. In our country, which first attempted to decimate Indigenous populations and then denied the humanity of African-descended peoples, an emphasis on the ambiguity of disciplinary violence and what it may mean to have “good home training” trucks in an open secret: We who belong to the land and have worked the land are fully capable of self-sufficiency without relying on the false advertisements of the American Dream.
The truth is that for hundreds of years, long before the founding of the Republic and in the ongoing abolition of slavery, African-descended peoples did the agricultural and domestic labor that created our modern global economies. Black family reunions must be understood from this context: as the concentrated effort of family genealogists reversing the evil of the slave-breaking methods, wherein the cohesion of biological families was destroyed by sending family members to different plantations to directly cause chaos in our hearts and minds for hundreds of years.
The idea of an American Dream meant and still means the capacity to not only own a home, but all that homeownership implies: the means to create the foundation for a thriving, close-knit family. As a direct result of the unpaid labor of African descended peoples, the unfairly divided gross domestic product soared, then fueled the Industrial Revolution, and funded the research of our own contemporary digital era, with the profit and return on investment with interest accruing to the descendants of slave owners to this day.
In my experience of Hayden’s branches and briar patches, I felt how deeply disturbing it must have been for the artist to realize what it meant to turn a living part of nature, an element of our habitat such as a tree, into a tool for lynching. To address the question of how a queer Black boy from Dallas, Texas, might see himself as part of “the American Dream,” Hayden—now a grown artist—might respond: “What are the ergonomics of an arborist as opposed to a lyncher? What else can a tree be used for other than as a tool for lynching?”
The American Dream is perhaps best measured by a wealth accrued in a variety of forms, not only the number of mouths caretakers can comfortably feed over a quarter century, nor the equity based on the square footage of however many homes purchased. Hayden’s “Home Work” shows a way of being in sync with the earth’s seasons of renewal instead of perpetual drudgery and endless consumption. The artist lays his hands into the wood, carving a way through the legacy of a pain localized by questions of belonging, and answers in a way that we may imagine is still informed by loving parents anywhere: How do I show the endless horizon of hope and happiness onto my child?
In Untitled (Dodobird) (2022), a cypress- and ebony-carved skeleton of the extinct bird sits perched atop a school desk with a replica of Ebony magazine beneath the seat. While the full history of Black culture’s formation is rescinded from public curricula, we are still being educated informally at home and either learning or relearning how to live in the cycle of seasons, taking pride in labor skill sets that include traditions of sewing, hand-carving, furniture building, garden plotting, and home cooking for a nutritious and beautiful life prepared for full self-sufficiency.
“Hugh Hayden: Home Work” is on view at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University through June 1, 2025.
