LOT LAB 2024
Hugh Hayden
Gulf Stream, 2022
Atlantic Cedar & White Oak wood, brass hardware, boulders
Loaned courtesy of Lisson Gallery
Connecting to global histories of African diaspora, trade, migration, and labor.
Nationally acclaimed artist Hugh Hayden is known for transforming wood into surreal installations, using the medium’s multi-layered histories to explore the complexities of the human condition, American history, and the systems embedded within our society and culture. Gulf Stream, a hybrid sculpture built in the tradition of clinker boats with a carved skeletal interior, brings Hayden’s investigations into the heart of revolutionary Boston at the Charlestown Navy Yard. This artwork was first exhibited in New York City’s Brooklyn Bridge Park as part of Public Art Fund’s 2022 exhibition “Black Atlantic,” inspired by the transatlantic networks of the past that make up the diverse identities and cultures of present-day African diaspora.
Gulf Stream symbolically alludes to the lives lost at sea during the Middle Passage, the forced trafficking of enslaved Africans to North America during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. As a major port city during the colonial era, Boston played a key role in this history, with the first slave trade voyage from the American colonies known to sail out of Massachusetts. At the Navy Yard near Lot Lab, the USS Constitution hull is known to contain live oak timbers dangerously harvested by enslaved labor on the coastal islands of Georgia. By recontextualizing Gulf Stream in this new site, Hayden’s work brings to light the presence of Black history often overlooked in the telling of Boston’s colonial narratives and embedded within our symbols of American heritage.
This artwork is further connected to our city through its namesake, an 1899 painting by Boston-born landscape artist Winslow Homer. The original scene shows a lone Black man in a broken down boat struggling against the sea while surrounded by sharks, with stalks of sugarcane on deck signifying the subject’s connection to sugar plantations of the Caribbean region. A 2003 interpretation of the same name by leading contemporary artist Kerry James Marshall reimagined the scene with a Black family sailing leisurely while a storm looms on the horizon. Lot Lab’s iteration of Gulf Stream is painted blue and white after a vessel from another 1899 painting by Homer titled After the Hurricane, Bahamas. Over a century, various versions of Gulf Stream have referenced the precarity Black Americans experience in the United States. Now presented in Boston, the artwork connects New England histories to global histories of African diaspora, trade, migration, and labor.
LOT LAB 2024
Hugh Hayden
b. 1983, based in New York City
Hugh Hayden’s practice considers the anthropomorphization of the natural world as a visceral lens for exploring the human condition. Hayden transforms familiar objects through a process of selection, carving, and juxtaposing to challenge our perceptions of ourselves, others, and the environment. Raised in Texas and trained as an architect, his work arises from a deep connection to nature and its organic materials. Hayden utilizes wood as his primary medium, frequently loaded with multi-layered histories in their origin, including objects as varied as discarded trunks, rare indigenous timbers, Christmas trees, or souvenir African sculptures. From these, he saws, sculpts, and sands the wood, often combining disparate species, creating new composite forms that also reflect their complex cultural backgrounds. Crafting metaphors for human existence and past experience, Hayden’s work questions the stasis of social dynamics and asks the viewer to examine their place within an ever-shifting ecosystem.
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.
