Stephen Hayes: Reclaiming the Discarded

Artist and Duke University Art professor Stephen Hayes began his craftsmanship journey when he was in only first grade. After watching his brother repair a remote control car, Stephen developed a fascination with building, tinkering, reconfiguring, and reimagining, finding scraps of material to transform into his own unique creations. From the workbench his mother built in their home, to the workshops and studios at North Carolina Central University and Savannah College of Art and Design, Hayes’ work took off. His works embody themes that critique capitalism and consumerism, touch on the deep historical threads of the transatlantic slave trade, and reshape cultural perceptions of Black subjectivity. His thesis exhibition Cash Crop has toured the country for over a decade; his work Voices of Future Past has been featured at the National Cathedral at Washington DC; and his bronze casts of Black civil war soldiers have reinvigorated an overlooked group of heroes in Wilmington, NC. Ella West Gallery is proud to present Stephen Hayes: Solo Exhibition as the next curatorial offering in our gallery space.

Hayes’ work is a historical sojourn from the shores of the West African coast, through the trials of slavery and Jim Crow, and into the modern day scars left physically and mentally on the Black community in America. His material explorations, which engage the broken and discarded remnants of our habitual overconsumption, speak to an understanding of the ways that we, too, are broken and discarded by a system that prioritizes productivity over community, appearance over quality, and symbolic wealth over wellness.