DALLAS, Texas (March 21, 2024) – The Nasher Sculpture Center announces its fall 2024 exhibition artists: Hugh Hayden and Samara Golden. Hugh Hayden’s exhibition, curated by Curator Dr. Leigh Arnold, will traverse the galleries and garden with wooden sculptures carved in his signature style. A new installation by Samara Golden, curated by Senior Curator Dr. Catherine Craft, will occupy the glass-fronted Lower Level Gallery, creating spatial illusions with mirrored surfaces and aqueous textures.
Hugh Hayden: Homecoming
September 14, 2024 -- January 5, 2025
Working in the tradition of wood carving and carpentry, New York-based artist Hugh Hayden builds sculptures and installations that explore the idea of the “American Dream.” Church pews, a dinner table and chairs, or a football helmet—signifiers of faith, family, and athletics—become surreal and somewhat sinister subjects in the hands of Hayden, who frequently carves thorns and branches into surfaces of things that would normally come into contact with the human body, implying potential harm, or at least discomfort, should they be engaged with.
For his exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Hayden will mine memories from his childhood in Dallas, nodding to homelife, school, and play from youth to adolescence. As a key component of Homecoming, Hayden will create a rendition of a children’s playground covered in thorns carved from the base material. The artist envisions a version of the playground known as “Kidsville” that was imagined, designed, funded, and built entirely by volunteer residents of the Dallas suburb of Duncanville in 1989. Hayden associates Kidsville with childhood nostalgia for a time when a community came together for the benefit of their children. Constructed entirely of unpainted wood, Hayden’s primary sculptural material, in a style evocative of children’s treehouses or Medieval forts, Kidsville represented the kind of playground architecture that has slowly disappeared from parks and schoolyards, to be replaced by industrially fabricated, colorful, metal and plastic equipment that characterizes most playgrounds today.
Accompanying Hayden’s interpretation of Kidsville will be a series of new sculptures by the artist, using familiar objects with complex cultural backgrounds to create metaphors for human existence and the somewhat fraught pursuit of achievement and status.
The exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with a central essay by Nasher Curator Dr. Leigh Arnold.
For high-res images, please follow the link below:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/vqd6rmsmh0trry8pumt2m/h?rlkey=wl8jwyghtkv6i7qv3iwladbcv&dl=0
The Nasher Sculpture Center's 2024 exhibitions are made possible by leading support from Frost Bank.
Hayden’s exhibition is made possible by leading support from the TACA New Works Fund.
Samara Golden
September 28, 2024 -- January 12, 2025
For nearly 15 years, Los Angeles-based artist Samara Golden has been creating installations that deploy architecture and mirrors to create disquieting and disorienting environments, often populated by individuals, or traces of their presence, that 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 can range from seemingly chaotic to quietly seething. Golden populates them with handmade domestic forms and textures using such materials as plastics, epoxy, and spray foam to construct a setting both familiar and ill-at-ease in its artificiality.
For her exhibition at the Nasher, Golden will create a new installation conceived for the Lower Level Gallery—a room fronted by windows, approached from a descending staircase. Visitors entering the gallery will encounter a seemingly infinite and fantastic space evoking cascading pools, ranging from the fetid to the paradisical—a place where memories, emotions, and possibilities converge. Within an environment constructed from converging mirrors, smaller-scale handmade elements populate realms that evoke sensations associated with water and waves, whether the oceanic reaches of the subconscious, the possibility of floating, suspended, as if in utero, or the enclosing depths that conjure the terror of drowning.
Golden has created works for sites as varied as a room with a view of the Hudson River for the 2017 Whitney Biennial, a two-story, brick interior at MoMA PS1, an expansive gallery with a stained-glass window for Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum, or a warehouse large enough to the accommodate the towering array that formed her 2022 installation Guts, now in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. In a time when mirrored surfaces often speak to opportunities for selfies and the closed loop of social media, Golden turns her mirrored environments into mise-en-abyme settings for uneasy enchantment and critical reflection.
The exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with a central essay by Dr. Catherine Craft.
The Nasher Sculpture Center's 2024 exhibitions are made possible by leading support from Frost Bank.
For high-res images, please follow the link below:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/2jqwzqfk4oan968miv2ah/h?rlkey=lnhvcwo66divqkhq39xqlyxh7&dl=0
Press Contacts:
Alexxa Gotthardt
Sutton Communications
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+1 330.472.3775 (c)
Adrienne Lichliter-Hines
Nasher Sculpture Center
Manager of Communications and International Programs
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+1 214.802.5297 (c)
+1 214.242.5177 (p)
About Hugh Hayden:
Hugh Hayden was born in Dallas, Texas in 1983 and lives and works in New York City. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University. Hayden’s work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in the United States and abroad. Recent solo exhibitions include Hugh Hayden: American Vernacular at Laumeier Sculpture Park, MO, USA (2024), and public art installations, Huff and a Puff, at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA (2023), and Brier Patch, at the Madison Square Park Conservancy in New York, NY, which later travelled to the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, NC, and Dumbarton Oaks Gardens in Washington, DC. Other solo institutional and gallery exhibitions include Boogey Men at Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Miami, FL, which travelled to the Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, TX; Huey, Lisson Gallery, New York, NY; Hues, C L E A R I N G, Brussels, Belgium; Hugh Hayden: American Food, Lisson Gallery, London, UK; Hugh Hayden: Creation Myths, Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; and Hugh Hayden, White Columns, New York, NY. Recent group exhibitions include Forest of Dreams: Contemporary Tree Sculpture, Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, MI (2023) and NGV Triennial, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (2023).
He is the recipient of residencies at Glenfiddich in Dufftown, Scotland (2014); Abrons Art Center and Socrates Sculpture Park (both 2012), and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2011). Hayden holds positions on advisory councils at Columbia University School of the Arts, Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University and Cornell College of Architecture Art and Planning. His work is part of public collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY, USA; Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Miami, FL, USA; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; and more.
About Samara Golden
Samara Golden (b. 1973, Ann Arbor, MI) has had solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York, NY; the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; and CANADA, New York, NY. Her monumental installation, The Meat Grinder’s Iron Clothes, was on view in the 2017 Whitney Biennial in New York, NY, and her major installation Guts was featured in Dreamhome: Stories of Art and Shelter, the inaugural exhibition for the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. She has participated in group shows at Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Baden-Baden, Germany; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, NY; Nicelle Beauchene, New York, NY; and Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China. Golden was featured in the Made in L.A. 2014 Biennial, Los Angeles, CA and in Room to Live at MOCA, Los Angeles, CA. In 2015, a monograph on Golden was published by MoMA PS1, New York, NY and her work has been written about in publications including Artforum, Art in America, Mousse Magazine, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. Golden’s work is in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; LACMA and MOCA in Los Angeles, CA; Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana, CA; Zabludowicz Collection, London, United Kingdom; and Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China. Golden lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.