Exhibition Opening Day

When: Saturday, February 10 , 10:00am-1:00pm

Where: Aronson Fine Arts Center

Laumeier Sculpture Park is proud to announce American Vernacular, Hugh Hayden’s first museum survey exploring a decade of his work in a variety of mediums including newly commissioned works. The exhibition will be on view Feb. 10 through May 12, 2024, in the Aronson Fine Arts Center’s Whitaker Foundation Gallery and in the Outdoor Galleries, near The Way Field. This exhibition was organized by deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in consultation with Laumeier and will debut at Laumeier before its presentation at any other U.S. venue.


Hayden’s vision draws from his personal memory and experience as an American and African American, born and raised in Texas. Growing up Black and gay in the South, and later training and working for a decade as an architect before becoming an artist, Hayden’s work merges organic materials with built space, and draws on folk and fine art vocabularies to capture various aspects of the artist’s personal biography and lived experiences.


Hayden often takes forms from everyday objects and reconstructs them, creating sculptures out of wood and other natural materials that become proxies for critical cultural issues. He draws inspiration from a wide variety of sources, including popular culture, traditional crafts, and storytelling traditions. Hayden’s artworks also engage with unseen threats of domestic life or the ideals and inequities that cut across racial lines in the U.S. The artist often grapples with an uncomfortable reckoning between the promise of the American Dream, the persistence of “bootstrap” ideology and the myth making around progress. He also examines the tensions between the enticing lure of social aspiration and the hard realities of inequity. The artist has stated, “All of my work is about the American dream, whether it’s a table that’s hard to sit at or a thorny school desk.

It’s a dream that is seductive, but difficult to inhabit.” The artworks presented in American Vernacular generally refer to distinct types of public and private spaces and feature the artist’s take on the trappings of these locations. For example, sculptures made from cast iron pans evoke home kitchens, elaborately decorated basketball backboards and hoops and helmets suggest sports fields and courts, and a row of church pews facing a neon “altar” evokes places of worship. Many works show Hayden’s embrace of the Surrealist approach of combining materials that would not ordinarily be merged, to create unexpected or even jarring sights, such as covering a cap or handbag in tree bark or weaving a basketball hoop out of hair.


Exhibition Opening Day

When: Saturday, February 10 , 10:00am-1:00pm

Where: Aronson Fine Arts Center

Conversation with Hugh Hayden

When: Saturday, February 10 , 11:30 am

Where: Kranzberg Education Lab

This event is free but space is limited.