Nasher Public

October 15, 2020 - December 31, 2025

Nasher Public is a public art initiative which aims to generate access to public art by Texas artists at the Nasher and throughout the greater Dallas community.

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Hugh Hayden: Homecoming

September 14, 2024 - January 5, 2025

Best known for his work in the traditions of wood carving and carpentry, Dallas-born, New York-based artist Hugh Hayden builds sculptures and installations that explore the idea of the “American Dream.” Reconstructing familiar things like Adirondack chairs, household furniture, or basketball hoops using wood and other materials, Hayden transforms these signifiers of leisure, family, and athletics into surreal and somewhat sinister objects. Many of his vernacular sculptures are covered in hand-carved thorns or unwieldy branches that imply pain or difficulty to those who try to inhabit them—a metaphor for the fraught pursuit of achievement and status. In other works, Hayden leaves readymade objects intact, only to cover them in tree bark, ultimately concealing recognizable status symbols. Likening bark to both armor and camouflage, Hayden uses it to show how clothing can be similarly deployed as a shield against racial prejudice or as a way of blending in or passing. 

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Samara Golden: if earth is the brain then where is the body

September 28, 2024 - January 12, 2025

For nearly 15 years, Los Angeles-based artist Samara Golden has been making installations that create disquieting and disorienting environments. Often populated by individuals, or traces of their presence, these spaces have in the past spoken to experiences of violence and its aftermath, disparities of class, or illness and recovery. Her often mind-bogglingly complex installations, which use mirrors in architectural spaces to create a sense of vast space, can range from seemingly chaotic to quietly seething. While Golden may populate them with figures, she has often focused on other forms, whether office equpiment, hospital beds, or the remains of a meal, suggesting a place recently deserted. Each element is handmade by the artist, who uses such materials as plastics, epoxy, and spray foam to construct a setting both familiar and ill-at-ease in its artificiality.

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