Stephen Hayes: Voices of Future’s Past

Born in Durham, North Carolina, Stephen Hayes is the 2020 recipient of the 1858 Contemporary Southern Art Prize. Hayes is a creator who works with a variety of mediums – sculpture, casting, knitting, woodcuts, video, and audio – to explore issues of race and economics in the United States. Hayes writes, “Like the works of contemporary American artists such as Willie Cole or Radcliffe Bailey, my work centers around finding beauty and understanding between myself, as a black male artist, and the nature of the object. My work fuses the past and the present, generally based on sociocultural and economic themes, highlighting American history as it relates to race, identity, and stereotypes in the areas of capitalism, commodification of beings, and the subsequent effects of cultural representation.”