Video Summary
This talk, given by artist Hugh Hayden in conversation with Nasher Sculpture Center curator Dr. Leigh Arnold, centers on Hayden's solo exhibition, Homecoming. The conversation focuses on specific pieces in the exhibition, highlighting Hayden's artistic intentions and creative process. Below is a chronological outline of the topics covered:
- Introduction and Initial Themes
- Exploring Materials and Identity: Football Helmets and Bark
- Skeletons: Examining Social Constructs and Relationships
- Scale, Process, and the Artist's Evolution
- Aspiration and Achievement: Rapunzel
- Nursery Rhymes and Subverted Expectations: Short and Stout
- Culinary Installations and the American Melting Pot
- Religious Indoctrination and the Power of Storytelling: Happily Ever After
- Autobiography, Nostalgia, and Pecanocchio
- Leisure, Comfort, and the Allure of Heaven
- Kidsville: Memory, Play, and the Shifting Landscape of Childhood
- The Kitchen Table, the Cafeteria Table, and Evolving Social Spaces
- Audience Q&A
Adapted from text generated by AI.
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 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 traveled 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 traveled 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 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; Smart Museum, Chicago, IL and more.
Transcript
Anna Smith:
Hi, good afternoon. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Nasher Sculpture Center. I'm Curator of Education, Anna Smith, and today it's my pleasure to introduce Hugh Hayden. Before we begin, a bit of housekeeping. First, please take a moment to silence your cell phones. Next, we invite you to join us again in two weeks for a conversation with Samara Golden on September 28th. For today, we want to thank supporters of Hugh Hayden: Homecoming, which include leading support by TACA and additional support by Lisson Gallery, Jessica and Dirk Nowitzki, Dallas Art Fair Foundation, and Howard and Cindy Rachofsky. Thanks as well to Frost Bank for leading support of our 2024 exhibitions.
Now to Hugh Hayden. In a time when cultural entities are increasingly facing institutional critique and scrutiny, the Nasher may be the only museum that is pleased to say we have skeletons in our closet. Luckily for us, they are gorgeous skeletons, hand-carved from white oak as part of a richly layered exhibition that interrogates the American dream and unpacks aspects of Hayden's formative years in North Texas.
Hugh Hayden was born in Dallas and now lives in New York City. His work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in the United States and abroad. Recent solo exhibitions include public art installations, Huff and a Puff at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, and Brier Patch at the Madison Square Park Conservancy, which later traveled to the North Carolina Museum of Art and Dumbarton Oaks Gardens.
Hayden has also had solo exhibitions presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, Lisson Gallery, New York, Clearing, Brussels, Lisson Gallery, London, Princeton University Art Museum and White Columns, New York. Recent group exhibitions include Forest of Dreams: Contemporary Tree Sculpture at Frederick Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and NGV Triennial at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia.
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, LACMA, the Studio Museum of Harlem, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Princeton University Art Museum, Smart Museum, Chicago, and more.
In conversation with Hayden is Nasher curator, Dr. Leigh Arnold. Dr. Arnold's most recent exhibition, 2023's Groundswell: Women of Land Art was described in press as, "A pivotal moment in redefining the narrative of land art." Her work on Hugh Hayden Homecoming has been a labor of love over five years in the making, so I won't eat up any more time leading into their conversation together. Please join me now in welcoming Hugh Hayden and Leigh Arnold.
Leigh Arnold: Hey.
Hugh Hayden: Howdy.
LA: Hi.
HH: How are you?
LA: Great. How are you?
HH: Pretty good.
LA: Thank you, Anna, for the awesome introduction as always. Thank you everyone for joining us this afternoon to hear Hugh speak about his Homecoming.
HH: In conversation.
LA: In conversation. Yeah, you're not going to give a slide lecture.
HH: No, this is not a lecture.
LA: I think the entire show includes different bodies of work that you've really refined over the years, and it's kind of a culmination of the past 15 years of your sculptural vocabulary. So in many senses, it is a survey.
HH: Yes.
LA: Yes. But it is all new work.
HH: A survey of different parts of my practice-
LA: Yes.
HH: ... exhibited through new works, yes.
LA: Exactly. The work on the slide Blending In, it's upstairs on view, but in and of itself, you today just described it as almost a little survey considering the different materials that it comprises, the different themes, athletics, youth, maybe some social anxieties being in a locker room.
HH: All the different components that make it, it's like the bark exterior on the football uniform, but it also has the helmet, the skeleton that is the hanger, the infrastructure that allows it to holding it up, but also it's one locker that's open and a vignette of 12. So it's kind of representing one person within a group trying to blend in maybe to the group, seeing this sort of interior closet in the form of a locker.
As a guy in Texas who grew up here in Dallas, there was at a certain height and size, you have kind of this obligatory expectation to play football. And so sort of a little bit of the piece and this idea of blending into the expectations of what people want you to do. But I wouldn't say this is, whether or not this is critical in either direction, it's just sort of showcasing this idea of being a part of something, being a part of a team to some regards.
LA: And of course, sports athletics is a common theme of yours. These are examples of earlier sculptures, taking the football helmet as kind of a subject to explore everything from differences in black hair to, what is it, CTE, the brain trauma?
HH: Yeah. I mean, I think people brought that to the work for me. That wasn't my own personal trauma, but I like, because the helmet represents, it's like an object that represents many things to different people. Obviously it has a functional purpose, but more so the sculpture on the left is actually made out of Texas ebony, which is this type of wood that grows not in the Dallas area, but closer to Mexico, like in Brownsville and Laredo, where it's a bush that becomes a small tree. And the interior wood of it, the heartwood is like this dark brown to black color. And so it has this kin of... Its name is Texas ebony, and ebony is this wood that is typically associated with Africa, that's black, Gaboon ebony, when I first heard of this wood, I was like, "That's my identity in wood is this Texas ebony, this sort of anthropomorphization of this way of looking at wood and that it could have a cultural significance."
But also, in this helmet on the left, it's kind of like a crown of thorns in a way. This sort of, it's black on the outside, but the sapwood, which is part of the same... Another part of the wood has been carved into these thorns that are these sort of internalized spikes, I guess. But you could look at this idea of a helmet as this protective thing that's trying to protect whatever is on the inside from something more dangerous. But whatever it is, seems like it's gotten inside the helmet.
LA: Also, maybe the pain that comes with conformity and-
HH: Perhaps.
LA: ... taking on the mantle of something that maybe you weren't interested in sports, but somebody in your life wanted you to play them?
HH: Yeah. And then the helmet on the right is from 2021, I think the one on the left is from 2018 or 2019, and one on the right is from 2021, and similar to the playground upstairs, it's like a oak helmet shell that has these boar hair bristles, which are normally used on a hairbrush and sort of this idea of refinement and appearance. And in this way, this helmet is sort of this application of this tool.
I think it takes on a different significance on the playground upstairs, but both of these, like the thorns, which are this sort of difficult space to inhabit as well as the bristles reflecting this idea of refining something, brushing it, putting it in order, or different motifs in my work that have to deal with sort of somewhat cultural assimilation or ways of attaining the American Dream, that they're both a process of refinement and I guess upward mobility maybe as well as difficult places to inhabit.
LA: So you've used bark to conceal or maybe thinking even of it in terms of armor, but basically to cover all variety of luxury clothing accessories. And in some cases, I think in most cases, up until the work that's in our show, it's been focused on luxury goods as this way of passing into a different social or economic class.
HH: It is, it has been, but it's the same. It's this idea of fitting the part.
LA: Fitting the part.
HH: So in some situations you have to wear the right shoes, the right purse, the right look. Whether you're wearing it to a job or a church or lunch with your friends, there's expectations of how you're supposed to dress and look to belong to a group. And that same thing happens at high school football, these sort of expectations of looking the part and that it couldn't be a conscious decision. Selecting this exterior skin, that's another manifestation of your appearance and how people perceive you in the world.
LA: But I also think about it in terms of high school, how do you gain kind of social status? There's some ways. There's wearing the cool clothing, but there's also-
HH: I would say we had-
LA: You had a uniform?
HH: ... a uniform at my high school.
LA: So the way for you to gain social acceptance or popularity may have been through success in athletics. So you think about the trope of the quarterback and the big man on campus and how sports offered a way for you to, maybe if you couldn't signify a certain level of status, sports was another way to do it.
HH: Or not even to be the lead, not to be the boss, but just to be in [inaudible 00:11:57] I guess.
LA: Part of something?
HH: Yeah.
LA: Yeah.
HH: I think for many people it's aspirational to belong, so sort fitting in as not always, it's just getting a foot in the door a lot of the time.
LA: This is a view looking up through the interior of the football jersey, and what you see on the inside is a rib cage. So we're starting to get into the skeletons that are included in this show, but also are another aspect of your work that you introduced a couple of years ago perhaps, but skeletons as something that some might perceive as maybe morbid or related to death or something. But in many ways, a skeleton is this beautiful democratic thing because you're unable to tell a person's gender. Oftentimes, you can't tell their race. A skeleton is devoid of all of these signifiers that we associate with these parts of our identity.
So you have stripped away kind of all of that to leave us with skeletons. But then you also play with our preconceived ideas of gender, especially with this work. There are two skeletons in an embrace hanging from what appears to be a closet. So you might look at this and immediately think skeletons in the closet, so two people with something to hide. Perhaps it's a same-sex love affair going on. But then when your eyes take you down to the feet, you notice that the tools that are appended to each pair's legs. I just reveal my own gender biases when I see a shovel and a spade on one skeleton and assume that's a male because gardeners are often men. And then the appendages on the skeleton on the right, mop and a broom, who's often doing the domestic labor in the household? Women, women maids. So you get us to kind reveal our own gender biases, even though skeletons in and of themselves don't really tell us much.
HH: Especially wood skeletons. I mean, most people's skeletons are all the same color. I mean, we never luckily see our own skeleton in life, hopefully. But these are a stand-in. I mean, essentially this piece is actually, they're just glorified handles of tools, but articulated into a body and this idea of a connection. I mean, these could be two lovers, two friends. They could be Adam and Eve, or they could be enemies or siblings or parents, but they're these two kind of opposites joined together so that regardless, they still have that connection.
And that hopefully using these things that many people are familiar with, there's the opportunity, there's no right or wrong answer to what exactly is happening. Hopefully with all of my works, that definitely I have some intent. And when I'm making something, I mean, a lot of these things are kind of difficult to make, so I can't just turn on a table saw and throw a piece of wood at it. There is some intention behind it, but I'm using familiar forms and concepts and materials that hopefully people have an existing lived experience and understanding of these things. But I'm remixing those things to this sort of kind of surreal, uncanny way that hopefully challenges your perception of yourself, but also maybe the subject matter that these sculptures are a stand-in for.
LA: And you titled this Made in Heaven, which is also a play on words, right?
HH: Yes. So it's often the term is like a Match Made in Heaven, but it's spelled M-A-D-E, but in this sculpture, it's a little bit like a maid in heaven with their perfect match in terms of thinking of it as a wordplay. But I also think it's just a beautiful object. This is my favorite work in the show, and just because it is not a fully rendered body, it has no arms. The point of it wasn't to just recreate two skeletons, and a previous piece called American Gothic-
LA: Which I [inaudible 00:17:04].
HH: ... sort of did that.
LA: Yeah.
HH: But I'm sort of building on myself and like an H exhibition, I want to explore different ideas. So this piece is similar. The skeleton has the rest of its body, but it's having a chance to relax and sort of like I... Oh, this is not the original Manet painting, but did... you found this online?
LA: Oh my God.
HH: It's like an AI thing because this is-
LA: Imagine the roles reversed on this and the original Manet. I'm so sorry, everybody.
HH: Yeah, the sculpture is referencing kind of the idea of this. This is a remix of Manet's painting of Olympia, which normally shows this reclining like courtesan with the Black attendant, who was named as Laure, and I've renamed my sculpture the name of the attendant. This idea of this person who's getting a chance to relax, but also a lot of the work has different details. The wood this sculpture is made out of is mesquite, which is a wood that's native to Texas in the Southwest. It's like a wood that a lot of people consider weed or invasive, even though it's native to here because it can thrive in situations with limited water and maybe take that resource from other plants around it. So some people don't like that, but I like that this mesquite is this sort of social politically sort of a wood that is somewhat kind of similar to a person, and it's this thing that has a right to be in a place, but people don't like it because they can think it's invasive, because it's struggling to exist in a place.
And I feel like that type of way of describing this tree is similar to the lived experience of many people who might even work in these sort of positions of a domestic worker, but giving this being who doesn't have... How does this person eat? How do they walk? All their whole life is working, is usefulness and sort of giving them a chance to relax. But it's also on this Ikea couch, which I kind of love seat that I associate as a sort of, for many people, this sort of entry-level accessible access to some sort of simple luxury, which is also something that is also repeated in another work in the show, this idea of what things that are accessible and comfortable, but as just a baseline to trying to live. I don't know. Yeah.
LA: I also, from a less political standpoint, think a lot about the great animated film Beauty and the Beast with the objects that become anthropomorphized and-
HH: Like the candelabra.
LA: Yes. And how it's actually really tragic because it's these human beings who just based on the fact that they happen to work as a maid, suddenly become a feather duster for the rest of their lives.
HH: Well, especially after you look at... Yeah, that's actually really... There're many people in the background that enable all of us to exist.
LA: Yeah, but it's also kind of the inertness and the lack of moving out of that station of life in some ways.
HH: Yeah. It's funny, because this show overall is like-
LA: All about aspiration.
HH: Or not. I don't know, because I guess a lot of the American Dream is that aspiration that hopefully, even thinking of the election, that things will get better, I guess, as most people would like America to be that thing, not that to waddle and it getting worse, but that even for someone who's worked their whole life, maybe at some point there is a chance to relax. So I guess that's aspirational. I mean, many people come here and go through a lot, live a difficult life maybe to provide for others. When I first showed the American Gothic piece-
LA: This is American Gothic.
HH: Yes, which is titled after the grant wood painting of a farmer, and I guess his spouse or actually his niece. I know It's not important, or is also a Gordon Parks photo, but this idea of these people constantly working. But someone came up to me and said, "Oh, this is a portrait of my grandmother who was always working so that we could have a better life, but they never were able to rest because they had X amount of jobs, keep food on the table and provide shelter." And so this piece is made out of oak, but it's the similar sculptures. They just have hand, I mean it has all the limbs. But also, I mean in making all these sculptures that are also kind of confident in their use of wood joinery and different techniques so that it's about having an idea, but also these are all real handmade things. It's not like using a good computer or AI. These are things you can see and walk around, hopefully not touch, but for the sense of preserving them.
But it's important to be able to actually create this idea so that it is visceral and that I think as a sculptor, my work is better experienced in person. It's not as great on a phone or on a screen. It's much being able to walk around it and using your eyes, and your whole lived experience comes into play when you sort of interact with these things. And yeah, I don't know how I gotten to that tangent, but in general I think my work is best experienced in person. This was a piece also made earlier this year where the skeletons are made out of different types of wood, and it's just the upper body.
And a little bit my use of these wooden sort of hanger-like skeletons is that thinking about a skeleton as sort of a hanger, that just as hangers hold up clothes, they also are, in the sense of a body, that's what's holding you all together. It's like your flesh, your organs, your existence, we're all kind of different, but we have this similar thing that's all holding us together that makes us, but we manifest it differently.
This is an older work from 2019. It was one of the first skeleton pieces where there were these arms that are kind of like a relics that you might find in a crypt of a church, but they're flocked in a velvet-like clothing. One is green, blue, and red. One is giving the finger.
LA: In terms of the scale of these skeletons, I mean, especially with American Gothic, they seem over-life-size. Is that-
LA: Gothic, they seem over-life-size, is that right?
HH: Just the limbs more than anything are longer.
LA: Because of their tools that are in front of them?
HH: Yeah, just it is to accentuate that quality. The ones in this show that we've made the limb slightly smaller so it's less, it's not monumental, but its-
LA: Is there a formula for that? How do you determine what scale to make these skeletons? Is somebody a model? Are you ever the model for the dimensions?
HH: Well, now at this point, we've made a set size for the torso and the pelvis. And also this is, I'm not a doctor, I'm not a scientist, I'm not a historian. I'm an artist. So it's not about it being perfect. I'm communicating the idea and just like I'm not writing about my work. If I could write about my work, it would really, well, why did I even need to make it? And so I think as an artist then I'm about communicating an idea and remixing my lived experience, my idea of history in the world and science to make these sculptures that, and also coming from being an architect, it's important that at first I was a little more strict about rules and this has to be perfect. This sternum really looks like this, or the collarbone is supposed to look like this.
And now I'm more comfortable with, this is just about the essence and it's the idea. This is obviously not even, it is not real. It mean it's not a bone made out of wood. And so it's, as I grow as an artist, I'm giving myself more leeway that I'm not trying to resolve picking and choosing. It's like with food, how much salt do you need for it to taste just right. It's kind of one, it's subjective, but it's about the essence of it all and that it sometimes I could work on something for another two days or two hours or two months or two years, but it might not change that much. It might already have enough seasoning to really already communicate that taste.
And so in terms of the skill of the limbs, there's no formula. It's just what feels right. And every time I make a sculpture, especially, a lot of times I get new ideas as I'm making something. But because a lot of these works are challenging to make or using scarce materials, I don't kind of switch horses midstream or however saying is, I'll save that idea from the next time I might be exploring something to try out this new variation of something or change in scale or size or color using a different wood. So I kind of make a mental note to come back to maybe we make the bones shorter. So that's what happened for this show.
LA: Okay. Do you keep a library of materials? Like a physical library or is it all kind of...
HH: It is probably the product of having leftovers, but that's not the intention to have just a stockpile of things because that takes up space, it costs money. It sort of, but-
LA: Also I think about the anecdote I heard where, and in a very early studio visit at your Cornell studio, Columbia studio that you had just completely filled the small studio space with Christmas trees and you were on the verge of getting kicked out because it was a fire hazard.
HH: Well, that had actually already happened, but it sort of, well, in that case, I was getting them for something I was working on at the time. But it's in general, some of the materials, you can't just go and buy at Home Depot, you have having to travel to Brownsville and find some people, local people to help you collect trees or collecting Christmas trees out on the street or even getting Ebony is actually kind of not that simple in terms of being able to just go out and buy some.
So there's definitely planning and management that goes into getting, sometimes you have to get a certain amount of the wood, so well, I'll have some leftovers that I can, a lot of my pieces are, it's not intended to be sustainable to save the world, but maybe it's often cost-effective to use a sort of nose-to-tail approach of using a tree or the wood because it took was so hard to get it that there will be leftovers or other parts that are less desirable.
But I can find a use for those parts so that they might stick around on a shelf for a little piece of time, but it creates a library and having to store it. But it wasn't necessarily the intention, but I've also learned it's better to have extra to get by maybe a little too much than to run out, especially if it's something that takes six months to get. So is better are to plan for the worst a little bit, sometimes.
LA: Going to shift to maybe something that's a little bit easier to get.
HH: Hair. Yeah, well.
LA: Hair.
HH: Well, synthetic hair.
LA: This is titled Rapunzel and which of course everybody thinks about the fairy tale of the maiden who's been locked away in the tower and the only way to escape for her to let down her hair for a night to climb up. And I assume, how do they both get out? I'm not sure. The story just kind of burns.
HH: Happily ever after.
LA: Happily ever after, which is the title for another work in the show. But in this case, this golden flaxen hair is tumbling out of a basketball goal from the rim. So you're here clashing ideas or colliding ideas of childhood fairy tales, athletics kind of aspirations. What are some kind of markers of achievement?
HH: Yeah, I mean, for me, that fairytale-
LA: The fairy tale of getting out of certain station in life because you were successful with sports?
HH: Well, I just see at the base level, the Rapunzel is this fairy tale of this pursuit and of overcoming a challenging task, get the trophy, or in this case the trophy wife or something. And basketball being this of, in this case, a metaphor for that sort of attainment of this sort of trophy partner or success. But it's kind of a placeholder. This could be relative to any career path, whether it's being an athlete or a doctor or business person or a curator or museum director. This idea of the accoutrements that come with success and after a struggle and a pursuit of something and that it's just sort of a metaphor that for many stages and a person's life or professional career path.
LA: And you've used these materials, this idea and different iterations, but the kind of variant is always the hair.
HH: Yes, there's been different colors of hair, different textures of hair, as well as different lengths of the hair, the regulation. One thing that comes into play these, at least why it's displayed this way, is the regulation NBA basketball, rim height is 10 feet from the floor. So I tend to show these works at that height. And then the hair is just, I think this hair is like 28 feet long or 30 feet long. So it's just the hair is in overabundance mean. Technically we could show this in 30 feet if the ceilings were higher, maybe we would show it at 30 feet from the floor. So it could really, at some point, I would love to make one that's like 10 feet, 10 stories tall on a pole or on the outside of a building or outside, but just this idea of this challenge or this thing that is this obstacle towards obtaining success.
And this is just kind of an ongoing body of work where essentially they making them longer each time. Also in making these, they're made out of this sort of synthetic plastic hair that's used for different types of braiding styles. And I made the first one of these in 2011. I never had long braidable hair. I didn't grow up braiding my hair, so I had to watch I think YouTube videos and got some dolls to practice how to, so this is 12 years ago, so I was like 28 and teaching myself how to braid hair. But that was just the basic of doing a three strand braid, but then creating a system where it's actually a little more complicated than just braiding like a human's regular person's hair. And that it's an intersecting pattern.
I don't know if there's a detail shot, but it's like a diamond pattern of hair that intersects, but also being able to add hair into it seamlessly so that you can, because the hair that goes into this is only four feet long. So there's also a system of adding the hair into it so that to the viewer you have no idea how it's made. And so with all of these sculptures, there's some sort of system that makes it possible because often it's the same repetitive step or operation or a system of rules, but it's added to this sort of material. But it's sort of some sort of really carefully orchestrated system that's organizing how it's made.
LA: I'm wondering if the, is this a three-strand braid?
HH: Well, this the-
LA: It's the detail of the-
HH: Yeah, I mean it hard to see here. This is the part where it's, I mean, just with catenary action eventually it just becomes a rope, but...
LA: So I'm curious if teaching yourself how to braid was any help when it came to weaving a basket?
HH: The basket weaving happened much later, and this sort of more basic form of basket came more intuitively. Actually, the basket in the show isn't the most complex one. It's just made out of a thick material. But I have, after making earlier baskets, I have made more complex ones where I've had to teach myself from old out-of-print books or some YouTube videos, how to weave something. Because a lot of these are, I think a braid, hair braiding probably never will get replaced by a machine. But many other sort of handicrafts like basket weaving is sort of like a skill that is disappearing even though basket weaving happens all over the world and that no culture owns it because humans, some of the oldest human artifacts are baskets.
LA: I think too about braiding hairstyling, especially with braiding or longer hair and weaving, basket weaving is those are often coded as feminine in terms of-
HH: Some cultures. In some cultures, well definitely in the west.
LA: But in the west for sure, and especially basket weaving as a craft technique. It's this idea that you're colliding this feminine coded technique with the masculine coded basketball rim. So you're offering this object that can kind of be both. What I'm also curious about is the weaving of this weave in braid color blonde, and they're very similar in colors. Was that a happy accident or were you just interested in presenting two basketball goals that have,
HH: That's more of a coincidence because partially the last Rapunzel I made was black. So-
LA: You wanted to do a blonde one?
HH: Well, I just alternated kind of through different hair colors.
LA: Did it have to do with Dallas? Dallas blonde.
HH: No, I mean I'm sure it would have, again, with a lot of these ideas, people have lived a relationship to certain things. So definitely it would have a resonance here a little bit. The last one I made was black. And so I normally don't want to remake the same thing and that I'm sort of challenge myself to, even if it's just changing the color of something, that it can expand on an idea. And because, because also I don't tend to make prototypes with my work and that each sculpture is kind of a prototype for the next, the thing that's coming after it. So it's kind of the test out some ideas of some other things I'm thinking of making that are another exploration of this that, oh, did I like that color blonde? I'm already planning the next version of that for another that I'm taking input from how we made this one and how it came out.
LA: You titled this basketball goal Short and Stout, which is a reference to the nursery rhyme. I'm sure many of us could demonstrate up here. We all have that in our heads, short and stout, also kind of referring to body types. And it's not common to find a short and stout basketball player, and it's hung considerably lower. So you have these two opposing basketball hoops, one at regulation height, one the height, which might suggest a children this hoop. I'm curious what else can you tell us about this idea of short and stout? Is it about body, body types? Is it about children's nursery rhymes?
HH: I think I started off having one idea of making this and it to evolve from what the finished result is. So I would say a lot of the works in, well, in my practice in general, because obviously I start off with one intent in how I'm making a piece, but sometimes what I was hoping for doesn't always express itself, so it goes a new direction. And so the works, the titles change, or even sometimes if the work comes back to the studio, I retool them. So this piece is sort of one of those that was, I think it still represents this idea of short and stout and this sense of a basketball that's kind of the opposite of the perception of a tall, lean, athletic, a basketball player. And this piece also gets to the crux of how I started making these basketball works. Well, I actually was making the Rapunzel works 10 years or eight years before I started making these woven basketball pieces where literally the basketball pieces somewhat grew out of this idea of literally thinking about where this basketball come from or the name.
And exploring that as an idea that also did bring in these ideas of this sort feminine craft with this sort of idea of this masculine sport and the juxtaposition between the two. These are works that now I started off with a specific thing I was interested in making them, but I'm now freeing myself from always needing to have an exact thesis for each work and that I can give myself the freedom as an artist to just start to make things that are moving away from needing to have a key to. And so I think the show has a few pieces that are more just now at this point as my practice, as I'm showing work longer that there's less of a guidebook to describe them, I'd say.
LA: So food has always been a part of your work. From the beginning, you were doing culinary, what did you call them? Culinary performances.
HH: Culinary installations.
LA: Culinary installations. But this series of skillets and melting pots has been ongoing for some time. This is, correct me if I'm wrong, the first instance of showing this variety of finishes in one work.
HH: There was one other piece that is similar that it is showing only, but these are all different metal finishes where the one on the left is polished aluminum. The one in the second one is cast iron, that's just seasoned with oil. And then the third one from the left is polished bronze. And then the last one is bronze. It's been copper plated and polished. But yeah, this is the piece is called Get Together. And this idea of this grouping or cluster of different cooking implements that all these faces, these masks cast into them, creating a meal is made up of different dishes. And we're even thinking of a potluck, but sort sort of way of bringing people together.
LA: So this series really began where you were taking traditional African masks in some cases, even casting your own features into cast iron skillets as this way of collapsing ideas of who were the first cooks in America?
HH: Well, it's not just about food. I would say just like the Rapunzel pieces that use basketball as a subtext, it's more of a lens and a metaphor for thinking of a larger idea. And it's more about thinking about America as a melting pot, a stew of diverse cultures and people, this potato or carrot at a piece of beef or celery could represent someone from different cultural or ethnic backgrounds. But this sort of pot that is this implement that of holds it all together to create America, that is this is built on these African cultural origins.
And that was the initial thinking about the creation of America was dependent on the African descendants, whether you thinking about just in culture, literally in food or sort of the building of the country and infrastructure, whether architecturally through the industrially or through agriculture, the African folks that sort of enabled the pot to create the stew that America would become or is. And so that was sort of the initial idea behind making this body of work.
And now it's just, it's expanded from that initial idea. At first, they were all just cast iron, and now that piece has aluminum and bronze components which are completely unfunctional and not necessarily in a culinary tradition, but now it's moving away from being as much a literal translation of those ideas, but more exploring now just difference in color and material and background that these works could be relatives or have things in common, but they're also different. And that, I think that's how most artistic practice expand from initial idea to start exploring the material possibilities now, so more now.
LA: This is an earlier installation image from your show at Princeton in 2020 where you see just the cast iron. But this you also used objects from the museum collection cast into those?
HH: Yeah, we used scans from the Princeton's art collection of not just African mass, but compared with different objects from the collection. So from an Egyptian sarcophagus to a Gauguin sculpture to different things that we were sort of put on one side of the pot and on the other side was African mass. So there was a transformation between the two sides that we kind of planned. We were able to create via 3D model.
LA: And I think this is kind of a direction that you're headed toward, which is combining musical instruments with cooking implements. So this is an untitled work. I think our registrar came up with the title You'd like to use, Sauce-a-phone? Is that...?
HH: Yeah. Because it's like a sousaphone bell, which most people probably don't know. What is a sousaphone is like a tuba that is more for maybe marching because it wraps around the body. But for the purposes of making these pot instruments hybrids, this is the bell from one of them attached to a sauce copper saucepan that they've been kind of welded together and then replated completely in copper. And this form first appeared in a larger piece. It was made up of multiple instruments that had been joined to pots and pans similar to this, connected to also shown with these melting pot pieces. But in this actually version of it, the instruments are all functional, they actually can be played and music comes out. It sounds different because of the-
LA: Alterations that you made to it?
HH: Yeah, the metal reverberations are different, but also in this case it's taking themselves a musical instrument like where the mouth is, the source of the wind versus, and the piece in the show, it's this idea of if the actual act of cooking would create music. So the recording that you hear is me cooking bacon, it starts off maybe slower, there's some racket. It's me, I get turning the fire on, putting the bacon in and then starts to sizzle. Then at the end I eat the bacon. And of course you wouldn't cook bacon in a saucepan, but it's more about the idea of this and also creating this object that I think if you think of those sort of old record players that also had that type of battle on.
LA: The [inaudible 00:49:57].
HH: Yeah, just sort of, it's more of an idea, even if it's impractical or not logical. I think that's what art is. It's sort of....
HH: ... or not logical. I think that's what art is. It sort of challenges the way you think about the elements that make up your lived experience.
LA: Jumping into the large topic of religion, this church. Well, it's a children's playhouse in the design of a church, so it's the scale of a playhouse-
HH: Play church.
LA: Play church?
HH: Yeah.
LA: You thought about calling it, I think maybe Sunday School at one point or The Children's Church. Inside the church is a pew and lectern for all those tiny aspiring ministers. Titled Happily Ever After, so this idea of taking the last three words that end most children's fairy tales, this kind of explainer that everything will be good from this point on, happily ever after. But also taking a children's house and transforming it int a church.
So, thinking about the ways religious indoctrination happens often through religious texts that are told to children in maybe watered down versions as a way to kind of instill morals and virtues, put them on the good path. But then fairy tales in a lot of ways are very similar in that they're also using whimsy and make believe to teach children lessons. Don't lie to your parents. Don't trespass, don't steal women's cookies. All sorts of, and they come out-
HH: Don't steal porridge.
LA: Yeah, don't steal porridge. Exactly. And it's all those derived from fables. So, it's about kind of the indoctrination of youth and how some people might believe that the religious texts are actually just fairy tales, right?
HH: Well, I'm not saying that. Well, I think that it's up to the viewer, but I am presenting this sort of fantasy or a materialization of this idea of yeah, it's a form of a church redone by Fisher Price almost in that theoretically it is functional. We're not allowing users in the exhibition, but every element was considered for a child using, like what would a pew besides for a child. I think my studio manager who has a two-year-old would say, this is like a two to four-year-old age range for this. But we did consider what was the right height for the ideal user experience, whether you're leading a talk or whether you're the person leading the discussion or the recipient.
I was trying to encapsulate an idea, but for me, I think it's important as artists, just as in the sculpture, it's a two-way street. I think there's multiple viewpoints of this piece that can be polar opposite. And so I think a lot of my works have that element. And so I don't want to say that it is this or that, but that it may be, it's not me, not picking a side. It's more of that many things, especially in America, do have two opposing perspectives that can simultaneously exist that are both critical and celebratory at the same time.
LA: And I think that you've incorporated religious objects or things that suggest a religious setting in several of your installations in the past. This is an installation of church pews with the red brushes attached to where you would sit. So again, this kind of discomfort in trying to inhabit something. Or this soap box type object that combines a skeleton with a box, with a live mic that allowed anyone to kind of step up and give a speech, give a... I don't know, evangelize.
HH: Yeah, I mean, a platform.
LA: A platform.
HH: Whether there's no age. You're never too young to start.
LA: Speaking of too young, the work titled Pecanocchio upstairs is this gorgeous rendering of a Pinocchio doll referencing that fairy tale again, but is wearing a very special outfit. This portrait that was taken in 1984, so you were probably about a year old depending on when, and wearing this corduroy jumper, bow-tie and white and shoes seated, kneeling behind this little wooden footstool. You were really well ahead of the curve in terms of your reading comprehension, full library.
And this is the third in a series of these Pinocchio dolls that you've made. I'm curious, is this, to me, I see it as a stand-in for you in the exhibition. I'm wondering because this show is so, it's in your hometown. It is homecoming, it is replete with nostalgia, memories of your own that can then be pretty universal to certain generations. When you saw this photograph, were you like, "I need to realize this Pinocchio doll," or what came first?
HH: Oh, needing to dress the Pinocchio... like, how would this one be dressed?
LA: So, it really became down to just trying to figure out how to dress him?
HH: Yeah, because I've made two before this one, and I had taken this, I saw found that poto last year, but I hadn't thought about using it to dress the Pecanocchio yet. Because I don't have kids yet and so I, in dressing these, at first I was just trying to make them dress like Pinocchio. Because most people's idea of how Pinocchio should be dressed is based off of the Disney cartoon, which is an invented outfit based off of a [inaudible 00:57:20] kind of lederhosen, which is the one on the right. And that was the first one I made, which was called a Ebonocchio, which is essentially Pinocchio more of the big picture.
I wouldn't say that that piece is intended to be completely autobiographical, but more so that Pinocchio as an idea is an Italian word, which is combining pino and occhio, which is like pino is pine, occhio in Italian is I eye, like an eyeball. And we know that as this wooden little boy, the puppet. But if you change therefore his type of wood, you change his appearance, his color, I mean, his race. So the first two, the one on the right is using Gabon Ebony from Africa, which is this wood that is almost black. So, he becomes Ebonocchio, but also his appearance changes because he's no longer made of pine.
Also, the one on the left... Then I started to play with his costume, he's called Nocecchio, which is walnut and noce in Italian. So again, his appearance changes, his color changes and his name changes because he's made out of a different wood. But in this case, I dressed him in a classic sort of sailor outfit, which is kind of like another trope or style of child photography since the invention of photography in the turn of the century or the early 1900s.
And then, so when it came time to pick an outfit, I did want to make one of these Pinocchio figures for this exhibition where for me, growing up in Texas, I always knew that a pecan tree is the state tree of Texas, just like the blue bonnet is a state flower, the Mockingbird is a state bird. At least from my perspective, those were always things that were important that we were taught when we were little up until a certain age. And so I didn't like pecans as a child, as nuts. I now love them, I love pecan pie. But I wanted to make one of these figures that was relevant to showing it here in Texas. And pecan is also a wood that is not grown for its lumber. It's grown for its nuts. And so the wood has a lot of imperfections in it, whether it bug holes or knots or occlusions or different things. So, it almost like he has chickenpox or a lot of things.
And also this figure has the longest nose we've made of one yet. And it was a little bit me seeing, well, how long can we make the nose? This is the longest nose we can make on my lathe. I actually am looking for a way to make one that's a lot longer because Pinocchio is all about, a big part of this wooden boy in that story of him, he lies and his nose grows. So, I think he looks cute with his short nose. And there was a debate about if we should make one with the little nose. We probably will at some point, but it took away some of the, I hate to say immediacy of the piece if it was just, if the nose wasn't long. It helps communicate. People know the story of Pinocchio, but they only know him being pine.
LA: Right. And they know him from the lederhosen or they know him from his particular costuming.
HH: And for me and my use of wood, I'm actually more interested in changing the narrative of creating a new narrative for other people who aren't pine.
LA: Well, and I also thought it was kind of humorous that this could be a stand-in for you in the exhibition, and you maxed out your lathe making the nose. So, what does that say about you in terms of your trustworthiness?
HH: Well, I mean, I'm typically too honest.
LA: Your mom's in the room, so...
HH: Yeah, no, I have trouble not revealing too much information, but yeah. It's -
LA: And you also put him in this crib, and some people might read the crib as a play area. If you're a parent, you're like, "Oh, finally I get some relief and I can do stuff in the kitchen because I can put my child in a playpen and let them rest it out." Could be in time out for doing something bad. Could be a little prison. Also, the crib is a little bit strangely scaled.
HH: Is it?
LA: Yes.
HH: Well, I will say, I do know wooden cribs, there's a lot of litigation that has happened around cribs in America. So you can't buy, the sort of cribs I grew up in are not legal. There's a lot of rules on about-
LA: Well, because safety standards.
HH: There's a lot of children have died in cribs because of their design of it. But for me, I was interested in also thinking about... Because the other two that I've made have just been on pedestals and shown in a more abstract gallery environment. I did want to use the exhibition to have some overall narrative about the show and that he's within the home part of the show. And there's no bed. I mean, there's a couch, there's a kitchen table, there's a stove, there's a closet, and there are these different things that represent a house. But it was important to be able to bring in a bed, like a bedroom in a home. What is a house with no place to sleep?
So, a little bit in choosing to make a crib versus the little stool I'm on in the photo was a way to have a stand-in for some sort of bed. I mean, he's wearing his shoes in it too, but I was thinking not just about the piece as it will live on which I think the crib, which is his container, this little prison. I guess parents don't think of cribs as a prison, but I mean maybe a baby does though, but it's all about perspective-
LA: Especially if they're walking.
HH: ... I mean, versus you're in or you're out. But it created a container and a pedestal. And it's based off of previous cribs I've made too. He's the same size of previous Nocchios made, just like the skeletons are all the same rib cage that we've been making that we are creating. Someone asked that my previous show, how did you all make all of these seemingly-different works, but we're kind of just building on what we've done.
We're not reinventing myself or making a new wheel for every sculpture. That we figure out how to make it and improve where we can. But also we can make the nose longer on this one. We can do a different pose in this one because we've gone through all the trouble of making the sculptures that they can articulate that we can, now that we've done... Part of me being an architect, maybe now that we've figured it out, I can now not just focus on the technicalities of it, but I can, what does it mean if it's made out of a different color wood or different pose, different outfit?
LA: Right. Explore this idea further through different materials.
HH: Yeah.
LA: It also adds to the world building and as you say, the narrative. So, you've already established you can make the figure, so now how do you build out this narrative around the figure? You create a crib for this figure to inhabit.
HH: And for me, the big most important thing about this body of work is what it means to make it in a different wood. Because as most people don't know that Pinocchio is made out of pine and that's why he's white, is how that's perceived. But there are many woods in the world and that all have different properties. And the more of these that I make, create different opportunities for people to see themselves in this narrative that they didn't see themselves being a part of. That's actually the most important thing about that body of work.
LA: I think we're getting close to time, but I want to get through some of the images, particularly of Kidsville. But I mean, the Adirondack chair is this kind of example of Americana. It signifies a certain economic class, the ability to have time for leisure, to have a piece of furniture that's fabricated from wood and nicely finished out versus some of the kind of lawn furniture that maybe I grew up with, which was either plastic or wrought iron. And here you titled it Heaven and you have it looking out on the garden.
HH: Yeah, because initially in terms of the title change, I thought I was calling it Reunion. This idea of, for me, I don't think of young people using Adirondack chairs. I think of it sort of in this sort of life cycle of rest and relaxation and retirement, second home, being able to leave work, family and just that opportunity to relax and sort of reset. But also this idea of getting able to settle down or even entitling it Heaven. I don't know if the pictures you can really see, but I've given it this effect of the paint is worn out in sort of the imprint of a person, that there's a ghost. And so whether it's this, someone is already, this sort of cyclical has returned to the earth.
Or even a lot of times why I started using branches in my work was actually about this type of camouflage, about blending in to a natural environment. And then anything that has these branches on it where you actually can't... we've removed the leaves or the needles. For most people, they don't know what type of tree this is. So it has, just like a skeleton, it has no race, it has no gender, it has no age, it has no religion. It could be anyone. And that it represents this dream maybe of what this Adirondack chair represents in this scheme of the American dream of having a place to relax or a second home or to rest or vacation. Owning property and land, that that could be anyone.
But also, I guess in the more of these you combine together, they create their own new forest or their own bush that also keeps people out. For some people, they might see it as a deterrent because how do you sit in this? How do you inhabit it? And a lot of this, one of the things I talk about in my work is this difficult space to inhabit, but a little bit America is this way of finding ways to inhabit things that might seem tricky or difficult to other people. And finding a way to... Excel isn't the best word, but how to make it ergonomic for your own lived experience.
LA: This is just been showing slides of another Adirondack chair that you covered in boar hair bristles, which is the same material that you covered the playground equipment in.
HH: And that's made out of the Texas ebony too, but the not as dark parts, just as-
LA: The previous, this one. Yes.
HH: ... a reference that most people never see this wood. And that piece was called The Preacher's Wife.
LA: Yeah. Kidsville is this, it's not there anymore. It is in some different iteration. It was recently taken down, but it was a playground that was built in 1989, so firmly within your childhood in the suburb of Dallas called Duncanville. And it was entirely imagined designed, funded, and constructed by volunteer residents of the city. And using this type of model that this architect and artist named Robert Leathers really championed around the 1970s.
And so it's this style of playground architecture that has turrets, medieval style architecture. Lots of tunnels and places for children to hide, lots of opportunities to get slivers. The key element of this playground style was the use of wood. And I think that was also kind of a way for anybody to come together to build it, because wood is a material that you can, most people can wield a hammer and a nail.
HH: Has an inherent DIY aspect.
LA: Exactly.
HH: Or that's why a lot of my interests, there are some people say, is this sort of vernacular. American forms of woodworking manifested in a school desk or Adirondack chair or playhouse or a church or kids' playground. So, that's why this was attractive as a motif... Or even a director's chair. But why I was attracted to the representation of this idea, the sense of play. And I guess for children, they don't see in the same maybe color, maybe more colorblind than the way an adult sees that. Typically children approach something without the same pretense as an adult would. But sort of to take something that that target audience is maybe more open-minded of how it's supposed to be used. But even subverting that with the bristles or with thorns to make it like a space that's harder to inhabit.
And I found that is another opportunity of this sort of type of, most of my sculptures are wood or in some way they have a dialogue with wood. Even the melting pots, the cast are made from wooden African mask that have their own layered histories into them. So, there is some through line, I guess with wood, through all of my work and that one of my attractions to using wood is it's this thing that many people probably take for granted that what a tree is and that it's all around the floor. This piece essentially is made out of brooms, is what this sort of form would normally be used for is a push broom.
But as an artist, if I'm able to change your understanding of not just wood and what a tree can be, but also these forms that I'm manipulating and there's this opportunity maybe even to change even a bigger picture ideas of how you think about the concepts a lot of these works are embodying and how they relate to you in ways that just would go beyond the immediate visceral reaction to these materials and forms. I think ultimately that's why I'm using wood and why I'm interested in to sort of pushing the limits of what it can do.
Because typically in America, wood is always like, this tree, all these shapes are because the tree was growing towards the light of the sun and I've put it back together. But the tendency of people, especially in the US, is to just cut a tree into these linear forms that only have no curves. Like every piece of wood in here has a sharp angle, and that's how we typically think of wood in the environment that surrounds us, but it's totally removed from the organic qualities that created it. And so a little bit, I would say that's definitely underpinning my idea, my approach to try to... This uncanny reaction to what a tree can be. And then using that as a jumping off point to reinterpret our lived experience.
LA: There's two tables in our show. They both feature pencils, either the eraser end out, which is the kitchen table or the graphite end out, which is the cafeteria table. I just love this video because it gives everybody an opportunity to see that this is a functional cafeteria table that you use that actually fold it up. But the first table that I saw-
LA: ... hold it up. But the first table that I saw of yours was the table you made for Princeton. Here it is installed in the gallery. And so that was an exhibition in a house, so a domestic space, so you didn't really have to work too hard to build out the world or the narrative of an interior domestic sphere in the way that you needed to with the Nasher's building. So this idea of taking a kitchen table or even a cafeteria table, these two places that are locations of community, communion, sharing a meal, doing your homework, being traumatized in high school, there are these two sites that are really meaningful to especially your upbringing, your childhood.
HH: Well, not just me.
LA: No, I'm saying the universal you.
HH: Yeah.
LA: I think all of us probably have memories of sitting around your kitchen table. All of us have memories of trying to find this-
HH: Or hopefully this piece is about some people don't have those memories. Or that-
LA: Or trying to find a seat at the cafeteria table for example. But this idea of taking a kitchen table, which is round, so there's no ...
HH: Head of the table.
LA: ... hierarchy, there's no head of a table. It implies equal access to it. But then you're subverting that and pointing out that it's not a given that everybody does have this access to this warm and cozy kitchen table idea. The idea of a kitchen table, what does it represent to most people? The idea of a family. This kitchen table has four chairs, so what do we think of when we think of a kitchen table with four chairs? We think of a nuclear family perhaps. And historically, traditionally, people think of, in terms of the American dream, the nuclear family has always been defined as a heterosexual couple with their two children. But that idea is becoming increasingly in flux. And so-
HH: Even at ... My apartment doesn't really have the space for a table. Many apartments now, at least in New York, aren't ... Because the ways people live have changed also. It's part of it that there's no space for it. People eat out, they order in, they don't even cook, they eat while watching Netflix, so that there's also this change in the way that peoples have lived. It's related to iPhones, and kitchens will become obsolete in a home. I like also showing this form in an art museum and that, while this isn't a history museum, but this sort of wooden apparatus will become obsolete even if there are no trees, like most of these playgrounds are replaced with plastic and metal ones, that these are archaic forms that were common when I grew up in the eighties and nineties, but also they're markers of a time.
And even when I was making some of the classroom related things during Covid, some people thought people would never have classrooms in the same way because of remote learning and Zoom and all these reasons why people get together less or come together less because of, it's a luxury to be able to have a meal around the kitchen table with a family for whatever reason, versus eating takeout, eating on the run, eating separately, eating alone. It's not a given or something that everyone has access to.
LA: I think we went really far over time. Apologies.
HH: And you all stayed.
LA: You all stayed. Thank you. Your prize is now we get to ask questions. I'm just kidding. I guess we could take a couple questions. Yes, Beckett.
Beckett: Thank you so much for this discussion. So my question would be, you were talking about a lot of the selection of the woods that you use in your works. And my question is for some work, is there a thought process behind the color and the grain of the wood, or is it just choosing a specific ... What is the selection process behind choosing the wood and where you're finding it?
HH: Well, the wood typically is not ... I think in every piece the wood is always a conscious decision, even ... I tend to use the least wood from Home Depot because it's typically just pine or two-by-fours that are like a chicken strip, like a ... I sometimes describe my wood as, because I'm going through lengths to acquire the wood, or the branches are still on it, it's almost like a drumstick with ... It has the foot attached, whereas a two-by-four is like a chicken strip that is completely devoid of what a chicken looks like. There's no feathers. There's no skin. At least it's still intact. You can see the muscle, versus a Chicken McNugget is like a piece piece of plywood that is scraps of a tree glued back together.
You know it's chicken because, I guess, you're told that. You didn't see it made, and there's no visible reference to that tree, versus by using woods that have the foot still attached, or the feathers on it a little bit, that you're seeing where it comes from, and that can create a ... Perhaps even seeing the wood that has different colors is coming from a different environment that created that, why ebony is black on the inside. So it's definitely a conscious decision to use ebony in a piece, partially because it's just ... If it's visible, its wood, the color is going to speak for itself, that it's creating a different reading of the artwork. But also a lot of times wood like ebony is much more difficult to use because it's very dense and oily, so we have to do different techniques to put it together.
And so in this show, not all of the pieces, but some of the works are using wood that's indigenous to Texas. So the piece on the couch, the Laure, is made from mesquite-
LA: [inaudible 01:22:02].
HH: ... which is the wood I was explaining, is that many people consider invasive and like a weed. And while seeing the piece, I don't think knowing it's mesquite, you don't need to know it's mesquite to appreciate the artwork. But conceptually that was a conscious decision to use that wood because maybe if you do know wood, you'll know mesquite. It's typically cut down for weed or used for barbecue as a result of people ... Very rarely do you find things made out of live oak because people don't, and especially in Texas, live oak is this tree that takes a long time to grow. It's stately. It means it's patience, it's time, it's history, all these things it embodies and that slow time it takes to get this big tree, versus mesquite can grow really fast under difficult conditions, and it can thrive. But often it's thought of as being invasive and a weed, and so I like this idea of celebrating something that's not normally celebrated.
But you don't have to know that to appreciate this piece. I'm just telling you that's why I chose to use this wood. But ultimately I think that you could hopefully appreciate this piece without reading the wall label of what it's made out of.
Beckett: Thank you.
HH: Any other questions?
Audience Member: So for questions, so how can you make the ideas to make the wooden sculptures? So how can you inspire the other artists, including the Pecanocchio and the skeleton and the playground? How can you get to make your ideas or inspire based on the artists? How can you build in your ideas and to get from inspirations?
HH: Like what's inspiring me?
LA: Like how do you get from inspiration to object?
Audience Member: Yes.
HH: Well, there's definitely some figuring out. Unfortunately, none of these things are like, can I just walk in. And actually, well, some of them ... Because I didn't just start making these things overnight. I have a practice of it. I've been building on making these pieces so that I have an infrastructure set up and a knowledge how are we going to make this. However, this piece, the first one of these skeletons with this ribcage we made two or three years ago, it's made through a process called bent lamination, which is how we're able to make the ribs so round. And that was a new type of woodworking that was like learning French because it's a process that's very different than just cutting wood on a table saw or chop saw or carving it.
It's cutting the wood into these very thin strips, where it's very fragile but flexible, and making a lasagna of them layered together, gluing then together, but also making molds for each piece. Each one of these skeletons uses about 16 molds to bend the ribs to a certain shape and profile, and so there was a trial and error. I'm not showing that. There's a lot of mess that created all of these pieces, a lot of sawdust and a lot of waste. So there's an understanding of the limits of the properties of the materials, and then finding a way to exploit the material properties of the wood. So how thin can we cut it? How to get to bend a rib? Wood, as we know it in America, doesn't really work well thin and round. In an organic, it's straight, it's thick boards, it's working with just gravity applied on the top of it.
So there was a lot of, there was some R&D, you could say, in figuring this out. And also this is eight different woods from across the world. So in this piece, your previous question, it's the same object made out of different woods that have different colors. And in this case, it does give a sense of difference and diversity by just simply using woods that are different colors, and their different properties will showcase a different idea than if they were all the same color. There would be a different reading.
But yeah, also in terms of how I figure out how I'm going to make things, I often am making something, and I get a new idea while I'm making it, but I don't switch. It took so long to get here. I'm not just going to take that exit. I'm going to finish where I'm going, and then I'm going to plan my next trip, and we we'll get off at that exit next time. And so I think my practice is building on keeping mental notes of what I want to do on the next piece or when I have the opportunity or the space.
Because certain things I can just make in my studio without a plan of where they're going to be shown. But certain things that are large scale, like the playground, I couldn't just make that and just have it sitting around the studio because it takes up a large amount of space. So I have to think about and plan what would be the best time and place to exhibit something and making it so that I can get that idea out there, but also conscious of I do have to consider space and what I'm able to make just within my own studio. And also all these things have a cost to make as well.
Audience Member: How long does it take if you make every sculpture?
HH: It varies how long they take. It's definitely quicker when we're making something we've made previously, but these aren't necessarily things that are fast to make, and unfortunately we're never making one thing at a time, especially for an exhibition. It's like a big matrix of ... This show we did make, per se, in three and a half months, but that was ... It's not just me. I have a team of assistants that also help, and I'm trying to use them each to their best ability, also within the constraints of a 40-hour work week with maybe 20 hours of overtime, but conscious of it's also their summer vacation or should have been. And we just had another show, so there's a lot of realistic things, so it is possible to make these works, but also, if I could have another two years to make this show and make the same exact works ...
LA: I think that's ... One more question?
HH: There are two questions here? Or ...
LA: Okay, yeah.
Audience Member: This will be really quick. I just want to say that I think this presentation, it's really great. It's really layered. It feels like tinder and evocative, and like you're saying, it's very personal but also very universal. I think you've also said this is your favorite show you've done so far, and it has some of your favorite sculptures. So I just want to hear, why do you love this show so much?
HH: Well, unfortunately there is something you said last night. It's actually the best show yet. So while I want, or I guess ... Now I have two dogs, so it's also the sort of question, now that I have two dogs, I would ... No one has asked, "Well, who's your favorite dog now?" But I do remember people saying, asking parents, "Who's your favorite child?" Which I imagine they probably have in their head the things they like about their different children better, certain things that one excels at over the other one. But I guess they probably would never tell someone that, "Actually, yes. I like this child better." There's probably things they like about each one that is celebrating their uniquenesses.
But this is a little different. These are objects, these sculptures I'm making. I am hoping that this is my best work yet, but hopefully it will get better, and I won't just stop and rest. And many of the sculptures in the show are improvements or further explorations of other works I've made so that I can expand on ideas, because a lot of them are laborious to make, and so I'm using this as an opportunity to expand on ... Some of the pieces are a remix and a combination of previous sculptures, like putting a blender ... And the football uniform is combining multiple works into one new work. That could be six pieces. Or technically the kitchen table could be five pieces. But now I forgot what the question was, but hopefully ...
LA: Why is the Nasher show your favorite show?
HH: Oh. Well, also I'm from Dallas. And even from a personal level, I first came here as an architecture student to look at the building, not ... I wasn't thinking I was going to become an artist. I went to the DMA every Wednesday in the eighth grade as part of a school program, and I went to a school that had a museum in it. But in all those contexts, it wasn't like becoming an artist was a profession or a possibility that I thought was possible, and I studied architecture as this more creative, professional pursuit. So it is surreal to now actually, being from Dallas and now actually an artist, having a show here is quite significant because having spent the first 18 years of my life in Dallas, I do have a connection to it and my understanding of it, so that hopefully ...
I wouldn't have made this show ... This show could be shown in New York, but I wouldn't have made this show to be shown in New York because it does have some things that I think will speak more to the local audience, or at least that showing the same work here, I think more people who are not in the art world, who just live here, could have a personal resonance with some of the works in the show, and I think that was important. Maybe that's me thinking as an architect about who the user is, but in terms of the audience and the context, I think that this show could have a heightened experience here then would be in Chelsea in New York, and so that's exciting to me.
Because I could show it in New York, and they review the show or whatever, would not pick up on all these local connotations because they were just unaware of certain histories. It's not like they can't experience the work, but they wouldn't have the same personal connection. And so that's exciting, to be able to show, like an Easter egg or something, to show something where people might have a greater connection to it or investment or heightened experience is also exciting to me.
LA: Does your mom have a question? Hold on one second. Can you stand up, Diane?
Diane: I'm the mom, but I am so proud of this young man. And the thing is, as an adult, we can all appreciate this. But I want to know, what do you want kids to get? What would you aspire for the kids that's going to explore this as a field trip? What would you think that they would achieve by seeing your art?
HH: Well, hopefully they have some point of view of, if a child sees the show who's grown up in Dallas, they might find it interesting or relatable in some way, even remotely more than they would maybe looking at an abstract painting across the street, that there's some notion of, "Hey, this looks familiar, but also very unfamiliar. I know it's a playground, but it's a hairbrush." Hopefully, a child seeing that might retool how they think about the world that otherwise they wouldn't. I think that's an interesting possibility that could happen. I can't say what that would lead to, but I think that exposure to it, a three-year-old doesn't need a PhD to approach a playhouse, but they might recognize that it looks like a church. And so I think I'm interested in that it might just change some expected ideas about the world and what possibilities can be.
Diane: Awesome.
LA: Thank you, Hugh. Congratulations. And thank you everyone for coming this afternoon and sticking with this well past time. The show is up through January 7th, and I encourage everyone to make repeat visits. Go spend some time up there while we're still open today. And yeah, thank you for coming.
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.