This article is part of our Design special section about creating space with the look and feel for one person.
At Hugh Hayden’s Brooklyn workshop, useless versions of utilitarian things are gestating all around. No chefs could cook with his skillets, punctured by orifices and attached to musical instruments. No basketball players could score points with his nets made of synthetic hair, trailing down dozens of feet like Rapunzel’s tresses. He and his employees implant metal and wooden blades in tables and chairs, and drape barbed wire and prickly vines across baby cradles.
Mr. Hayden, who is Black, gives sardonic titles to his artworks, reflecting how systemic racism has blocked upward mobility for some. His forbiddingly spiky school desk is called “Work-Study.” A wooden ladder sprouting garden shears is “Higher Education.”
During a recent workshop tour, Mr. Hayden, 40, sported eyeglasses trimmed in fir twigs harvested from the Dolomite mountains in Italy. He leafed through piles of raw cotton and vintage books about wicker and rattan furniture, pondering new ways of weaving. Thorny smilax vines were strewed underfoot, and a sandaled reporter, dazzled by the varied work in progress, narrowly avoided goring her toes.
He brought out chocolaty chunks of bark, the stuff he has layered on Timberland boots and Burberry trench coats. “It’s fun when it has the lichens and moss on it,” he said. Despite the razor edges on his chairs, gallery goers still sometimes mistake them for something supportive: “People try to lean on them, out of an instinct.”
His staff was on deadline, sanding bits of Christmas trees for a dining set and braiding blond wig strands, alchemically transforming detritus into commentary on injustice. This fall, Mr. Hayden has one-person exhibitions at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas (opening Sept. 14, with an oaken playground castle bristling with boar hairs) and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. (opening Sept. 18, with a cottage engulfed in branches).
He is participating in group shows at R & Company gallery in New York (“Objects: USA 2024,” opening Friday, with his giant vessel made of woven rattan) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (opening Oct. 19, with his rattan basketball backboard laced in vines). In 2025, his team will build a hemlock whale skeleton for the grounds of the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., and fill a desert ghost town near Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates, with overgrown classroom desks.
Mr. Hayden, a Dallas native, previously worked as an architect, with projects including clothing stores and Starbucks outlets. He comes across as self-effacing and unrattled by his growing art-world fame on multiple continents. He was equally unfazed during the interview by his Ibizan hounds, Mars and Jupiter, longing to escape their corral and chew on some rattan.
When Mr. Hayden visits exhibitions surveying his own past work, he said, he has a series of reactions. It can start with “gosh, yeah, I’ve done a lot.” And then, he added, “Sometimes I start critiquing it: ‘I should have made it differently.’”
Read More: An Artist With Sharp Edges
