Meet Hayden Dunham, a Brooklyn-based designer and artist who works with unique materials to create everything from clothing to environments. She is also the next artist that will be taking over the truck for Art Cart NYC™’s presentation at the New Museum’s Festival of Ideas for the New City on May 7. 

Since graduating from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Studies, Hayden has been working with set and costume design and showed her first collection of experimental clothing at Williamsburg Fashion Week . Drawing inspirations from these various fields, her work often uses layers of installation, costume, and performance.

For one of Hayden’s recent projects, Paper Village, 2011, she covered the floor and walls of a room in St. Cecilia’s Convent in Brooklyn with small strips of paper, in which she nestled a tiny village made of cardboard houses illuminated from the inside. The room was filled with murmurs of stories being told very quietly from within the houses, and visitors were welcomed into this delicate world of childlike wonder. For her project with Art Cart NYC™, Hayden will take look at similar concepts of innocence and escape, but will also incorporate and deconstruct themes of femininity and nature.

To see more of Hayden’s projects, take a look at her website.