Visual Arts Alumnus Hugh Hayden '18 Commissioned to Create Installation for deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum

The deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts has commissioned Visual Arts alumnus Hugh Hayden ’18 to create Huff and a Puff, an outdoor sculpture installation which will be on view until November 1, 2026. The subject of the sculpture is writer Henry David Thoreau’s one-room home, in which he wrote Walden in 1845. Studied for its meditations on solitude, self-reliance, and the natural world, Walden proposes a mode of life stripped to its essential elements. For several years, the book served as an icon of rugged American individualism, perpetuating the mythos of the self-made American Dream and its dreamers. 

In Huff and a Puff, Hayden takes as his start the replicated structure of Thoreau’s dwelling and he extends that structure both literally and metaphorically until the unexamined facets of Walden come into stark view. 

The replicated dwelling “dramatically slant[s] toward the viewer, conveying a surreal, tensioned force upon this iconic home,” the museum’s press release explains. 

Hayden, who is known for making materially conscious sculptures that draw attention to the mythic and mundane elements of American identity, utilizes that tensioned force to bring forth “a dystopian meditation on the lives of marginalized groups, debt, challenges of home ownership and living in a climate-stressed world today,” he notes. 

Indeed, the replicated dwelling “is leaning forward, on the offense to life on the brink,” to such a degree that one may wonder how long the structure, and the structural socio-political representations at play, may stand up. In so doing, Hayden speaks to the difficulty of inhabiting the American dream today while comfortably toggling the line between art as art and art as social discourse. 

In Hugh Hayden: American Vernacular, a recently published book by deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum Senior Curator Sarah Montross, Hayden points out that all of his work “is about the American dream, whether it’s a table that’s hard to sit at or a thorny school desk. It’s a dream that is seductive, but difficult to inhabit.” 

Hugh Hayden was born in Dallas, Texas in 1983 and lives and works in New York. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2021–22), Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey (2020) and he has had major outdoor installations at Madison Square Park (2021) and Brooklyn Bridge Park (2021). Hayden’s work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Princeton University Art Museum; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.

Hugh Hayden: Huff and a Puff is commissioned by Art & the Landscape, an initiative of The Trustees. Lead support for Art at The Trustees is provided by Mr. Richard M. Coffman and Mrs. Gabrielle C.F. Coffman. This project is also supported by Lisson Gallery, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Next Generation Fund of the Roy A. Hunt Foundation, Marjorie and Nick Greville, Janet and David Offensend, Kathleen O’Hara, Valerie Talland and Nagesh Mahanthappa, Maria Garzon Vassallo and Mark Vassallo, and Elissa and William Warner.