Jessica May ’99

Managing Director, Art and Exhibitions and Artistic Director
deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum Lincoln, Massachusetts

Barnard Magazine

Winter 2024

Cabin in the woods askew at an angle as if blown by the big bad wolf. — *Huff and a Puff*, 2023, by Hugh Hayden (b. 1983, Dallas). Wood, mirrored glass, brick, steel. Lead support for Art at The Trustees is provided by Mr. Richard M. Coffman and Mrs. Gabrielle C.F. Coffman. Additional support provided by Lisson Gallery, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Next Generation Fund of the Roy A. Hunt Foundation. Photo of May: Mel Taing.

This past fall, we completed a years-in-the-works commission, Huff and a Puff, by New York-based artist Hugh Hayden. The work is part of our ongoing program of commissions called Art & the Landscape, where we work with artists to develop large-scale, site-specific outdoor sculpture at the deCordova and throughout Massachusetts on properties cared for by our parent organization, The Trustees. Typically, these works are loans, but we are overjoyed to welcome Hugh’s incredible sculpture for the long haul by committing to care for it in perpetuity.

The work is profoundly resonant in our 30-acre sculpture park in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Huff and a Puff is a meticulous re-creation of 19th-century naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau’s cabin at nearby Walden Pond (itself a 20th-century reconstruction of the original) — but at 20-degree angles forward and to one side. The work leans; it might be falling, or maybe just adopting what the artist calls the “offensive position.” Its mirrored windows reflect ground on one side, sky on the other. Every single element — every shingle, every brick — is hand shaped with a slant to keep us viewers off-kilter.

Our chief curator, Sarah Montross, has inspired me with her description of this work as twisting and bending our sense of history. Indeed, in ways hard to pinpoint, Huff and a Puff has done a number on my own mental map of the stories of Thoreau and Emerson, of Walden, of transcendentalism and 19th-century American life and letters. It keeps me thinking about contingency and interconnectedness in American history, the push and pull of people and nature, and even, or especially, the values I associate with being upright.

The absolute best thing about working with artists on public commissions is that they invite us to see the environments around us through very different perspectives; they push us, hard sometimes, to reconceive of the familiar in our everyday lives. Hugh has a deep sense of humor but holds a razor-sharp view of American culture and history — Huff and a Puff entertains, but the impression is deep, lasting, upending.