Hugh Hayden’s Brier Patch is now on view in Madison Square Park. Presented across four separate lawns in the park, Brier Patch will feature a total of one-hundred wooden elementary school-style desks that erupt with tree branches, cohering into tangled assemblies with complex and layered meanings. The accumulations of desks summon the grid arrangement of classroom seating. Referencing folklore traditions around the world, the work calls on the notion of the brier patch as a place protective for some and dangerous for others, drawing connections to similar disparities within the education system and the ideal of the American Dream. 

 “My wood is like bone-in chicken, with the foot even — you’re still seeing this is a tree,” Hayden said in a NYTimes feature. Above: Hayden creates a seamless transition from the wooden desk top to the branches in the wood shop. Credit...Douglas Segars for The New York Times

“In Hugh Hayden’s project, the overgrown configuration of branches overwhelms and encumbers the placidity of seats of childhood learning. Hayden imbues each of his works with intense meaning that, when peeled back, reveals lived experiences about rooted systems in our country and the world. He transforms everyday objects into new forms that expose the properties and purpose of the original source,” said Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Deputy Director and Martin Friedman Chief Curator of Madison Square Park Conservancy. “Brier Patch is both visually powerful and loaded with inherent tensions—growth and stagnation, seduction and peril, individual and community—that ask us to consider how these dichotomies coexist in engrained systems and the work on view.

On view from January 18 through April 24, 2022 at  Madison Square Park, Broadway-Madison Ave., between East 23 Street and East 26 Street, NY, NY Info  (Top: Photo by Rashmi Gill Photography)
Hayden: Boogey Men continues at ICA Miami through April. Info

Thursday, January 20, 7 pm EST Online: David Butow on Brink

Monroe Gallery of Photography is presenting a virtual conversation between journalist Steve Appleford and photographer David Butow about Butow's new book BRINK (Punctum Press) on January 20, 5 pm MST. BRINK chronicles the events that led to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Register Info An exclusive interview with David will be featured in tomorrow’s DART. Above: © David Butow

Opening Thursday, January 20: Toni Morrison’s Black Book at David Zwirner
Organized by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author, critic, and curator Hilton Als, who wrote Toni Morrison’s New Yorker obituary in 2019,  the exhibition will focus on the enormous output and cultural significance of Toni Morrison (1931–2019., As Als notes, the show  “will add visual components that italicize the beauty and audacity of her work.” Included will be selected archival materials as well as work by artists Garrett Bradley, Beverly Buchanan, Robert Gober, Kerry James Marshall, Julie Mehretu, Walter Price, Amy Sillman, Bob Thompson, and James Van Der Zee, among others, some of which have been commissioned for the exhibition and were made in direct response to Morrison’s writings.
Above: Photographer unknown, Toni Morrison in China, 1984. Courtesy Princeton University Library (Toni Morrison Papers, Manuscripts Division, Special Collections, Princeton University Library)

David Zwirner, 525 & 533 West 19th Street, NY, NY Info

Thursday, January 20, 4-8 pm: L.E.S. Gallery Night

Above: Jiha Moon, Yellowave (Stranger Yellow), on view at Derek Eller Gallery, 300 Broome Street, NY, NY Info Participating Galleries Info

Opening Friday, February 4, 6-8 pm: Group Show #2 at Usagi NY Project Space Gallery

Group Show #2 NYC, organized by Leah Oates, is a celebration of friendship in the NYC arts community. A
Artists: Marcy Brafman, Katherine Daniels, Klay-James Enos, Nathan Feldman, Jack Gill, Stefan Hagen, Shane Harrington, Julian Jackson, AKaiser, Miles Ladin, Rene Lynch, Karen Marston, Victoria Neel, Leah Oates, Maddy Rosenberg, Carol Salmanson, Gregory Sholette, Max St-Jacques and Pierre St-Jacques. Above: Klay-James Enos, Posthuman Portrait (Young Woman) (Detail), 2021 

Usagi NY Project Space Gallery, 163 Plymouth Street, Brooklyn, NY Info

Artist Walk-through: Saturday, January 22, 2 pm:  Henry Horenstein at NAGA Gallery

“Horenstein’s creatures are decontextualized. They appear without the backdrop
of the natural landscape, outside even the artificial world of the zoo or aquarium, and devoid of their true color. As a consequence, the images are truly arresting; in both a literal and metaphorical sense we see these animals as we have never seen them before. – Elisabeth Werby, Executive Director, Harvard Museum of Natural History, 2005

Gallery NAGA, 67 Newberry Street, Boston, MA RSVP: mail@gallerynaga.com + 617-267-9060 More about Henry

February 4, 2-5pm ET online: Let’s Make Letters with Kelcey Gray

Even when trapped behind our computer screens, typography behaves as if it were physical: it stretches, it compresses, it thickens, it thins, and animates. In this workshop, Austin-based designer Kelcey Gray will guide participants in using paper, pencil, and scissors to draw type and build folded paper structures that will serve as scaffolding for typographic manipulation. Register See DART feature here
This event is discounted for The One Club for Creativity and Type Directors Club Members. Members, please email director@tdc.org for a discount code.