A Close Look at the Giant Wooden Ribcage, Slowly Decaying in Williamstown's Woods

Saturday, September 12, 1pm | Williamstown, MA | Free, no registration required

The Clark Art Institute leads a close examination and discussion of Hugh Hayden's outdoor sculpture "the End" on September 12, the final installment of its "Ground/work 2025: A Close Look" series. A Clark educator guides you through the piece and its relationship to the surrounding landscape.

Hayden, a Dallas-born artist who trained first as an architect at Cornell before earning an MFA at Columbia, built "the End" from hemlock trees harvested near the Clark's own campus, milled to preserve their protruding branches and joined with cedar into the shape of an enormous, upside-down ribcage—something between a human skeleton and a beached whale, roughly 34 feet long. Installed in the woods just off a walking trail, the piece is deliberately camouflaged in the very forest it came from.

Hayden has described it as neither temporary nor permanent but somewhere in between: made of wood native to the region, it will decay naturally over time rather than persist unchanged like bronze or stone. Skeletal forms are a recurring motif in his work, drawn to what he's called their anonymizing quality—stripped of the external markers, like race or gender, that usually announce identity.

The piece is a part of "Ground/work 2025," the Clark's second outdoor sculpture exhibition, curated by Glenn Adamson across the museum's 140-acre campus and running through October 12. Five other international artists—Yō Akiyama, Laura Ellen Bacon, Aboubakar Fofana, Milena Naef, and Javier Senosiain—have work sited throughout the grounds as well, each piece engaging themes of decay, regeneration, and the passage of time in its own material.

Lunder Center at Stone Hill, Clark Art Institute, 225 South Street, Williamstown, MA. Free. Details at events.clarkart.edu.