JAMES RUSSELL | Contributing Writer
james.journo@gmail.com
Hugh Hayden knows the meaning of a homecoming: The gay, Black artist played football at Jesuit High School in Dallas, and he has experienced the jubilance, social events and dances of the annual homecoming games.
Now based in New York, the artist is experiencing a different type of homecoming. There’s no crowd, no tailgating and no dance, but there is a cafeteria and locker room in his solo show Hugh Hayden: Homecoming.
This show is Hayden’s hometown debut, and it runs through Jan, 5 at the Nasher Sculpture Center.
Hayden’s best known for building critiques of the American Dream. That includes criticizing the inaccessibility to public education, as in his 2022 installation Brier Patch, an ambitious installation in New York’s Madison Square Park of 100 newly-minted school desks assembled into “classrooms,” and his recent commentary on Black masculinity, guns and queer life built around bathroom stalls at Lisson Gallery in Los Angeles.
Hayden is less known for opening up about his personal life.
The title Homecoming, said curator Leigh Arnold, takes on multiple meanings. It refers to the Texas high school pastime of football, his youth and the simple fact it’s his first solo show in Dallas.
“The theme isn’t new to him by any means. But with the objects he’s making, the idea of home typically means safety and where you feel loved and accepted,” Arnold said.
“I’m using the word ‘typically’ because that’s the idea of home that is part of this overarching theme of the American dream,” Arnold added. “What he’s doing is showing how it can be a scary place. For a lot of people, especially LGBTQ people, a home might be a really tragic place for you to be or a place where you don’t feel safe or accepted.”
The show has three structures, which Hayden prefers to call “domestic spaces.” Two interior spaces (a house on one side and school, locker room and chapel on the other) are connected in the center by a reconstructed
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