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by Nicholas Frank, Oct 6, 2026

In the fall of 1980, students at the Hockaday School, an elite girls’ prep school in Dallas, filed past a low aluminum ring installed on the lawn outside their entrance. They didn’t know what to make of it. The sculpture, Smoke Rings: Two Concentric Circles Skewed, Non-Communicating, belonged to Bruce Nauman, an artist few in Dallas had heard of, brought to town by a young gallerist named Carol Taylor for the inaugural show at her new space. The public reception of the work wasn’t great, but a photo of Nauman crouched beside his work made it into that year’s yearbook anyway, a footnote to a visit the city had all but forgotten.

That footnote is the starting point for “Bruce Nauman: Identical,” on view at the Nasher Sculpture Center, marking the first Nauman exhibition organized by a Texas museum. Curator Leigh Arnold uncovered the forgotten Hockaday event while organizing the show. The sculpture holds a key to understanding Nauman’s work, according to Arnold, in addition to a valuable piece of Dallas history.

Nauman started the “Smoke Rings” series in 1977 as a way of exploring tunnels as sculptural forms whose insides can be seen but whose outsides can generally only be inferred. In the 1980 sculpture, the two interlocking circles are “arranged obliquely so you can see the interior of the circle, as well as the exterior, at the same time,” Arnold said. “It’s this thing he’s been exploring for decades, a through line in his practice. What’s interior, what’s exterior, what are we presenting to the world, versus what are we holding in ourselves?”

A Dallas Debut So what brought the artist to the Hockaday School? Taylor—a former Dallas debutante and an alum of the institution—moved back to her hometown in 1974 after spending the 1960s working at New York’s influential Parasol Press, helping to make print editions by Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, and many other minimalists. During a trip to Santa Fe, she came across one of Nauman’s prints. “I thought, ‘what is this?,’” Taylor, now 78, said in a video call. After looking at it closer, “it just clicked.”

Nauman’s work stuck with her, and when she decided to open her own gallery in 1980, she got the green light from Leo Castelli’s New York gallery to bring some of the artist’s work to Dallas for her first show that December.

It was a big move for a small gallery. By this time, Nauman had cemented his status as a force in conceptual American art with dual outings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and New York’s Whitney Museum in 1972. He’d also made waves with his proposal for the monumental Square Depression at the inaugural Skulptur Projekte Münster in 1977, which was deemed too aesthetically and logistically extreme by planning authorities. (It wasn’t realized for another 30 years.)

Despite his renown and radicality, Taylor said she found the artist to be consummately polite, a quiet man with a wry sense of humor and a taste for oysters and the occasional sip of Wild Turkey Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey. When he said he wanted to install a public outdoor work as part of his exhibition with her gallery, Taylor pulled some strings with her alma mater, which had a big enough lawn to fit it.

Smoke Rings: Two Concentric Tunnels Skewed, Non-Communicating sat low to the ground: two 15-foot cast-aluminum circles, quartered into sections with slight gaps, in a black satin patina. Clunky shims lifted the 21-inch-high sculpture just above the grass. Each circle was built from V-shaped sections with open sides facing each other, set askew so the two “tunnels” never lined up—a person walking through one couldn’t cross into the other, only watch it from a distance.

The work was up for six weeks. The community largely hated it.

“People were horrified,” Taylor said. (The chilly reception didn’t stop Taylor from mounting another Nauman exhibition in 1983, although the sculptures were confined to her gallery that time.)

Despite early reactions to Nauman’s work as “often bleak, sometimes bewildering,” Arnold said that the beauty of the artist’s work is that it plainly reveals the underlying mechanisms of sculpture, allowing anyone to clearly see how things are made. The artist’s insistence on planting the large-scale, 3D version of his “Smoke Rings” drawing on a Dallas lawn in tandem with drawings in Taylor’s gallery underscored what Arnold calls his longstanding interests in the “tangibility of space versus the intangibility of virtual space.”

Studies in Imperfection Even if Taylor’s 1980 show that first brought Nauman’s work to Dallas wasn’t perfect—at least not by the public’s estimation—Nasher director Carlos Basualdo and Arnold seized the chance to reintroduce him to Texas audiences. “Bruce Nauman: Identical” reworks “Begin Again,” the artist’s 2024 show at Sperone Westwater in New York. Basualdo, who curated Nauman’s U.S. Pavilion presentation at the 2009 Venice Biennale, saw that exhibition firsthand. After he joined the Nasher in 2025, he and Arnold saw an open slot on the schedule and deemed it the perfect opportunity to bring the artist back to Dallas.

“Identical” features suspended polyurethane, silicone rubber, and plaster-cast taxidermy mold sculptures of coyotes and foxes, similar to those in “Begin Again.” The sculptures are paired with silverpoint and goldpoint drawings of the molds—the standard forms taxidermists use to shape animals into lifelike sculptures. Once again, Arnold said, Nauman is revealing an object’s interior while we regard its exterior.

As to the exhibition title, Arnold said Nauman focused on how important imperfection is in making sculpture. “The hope and desire of sculptural casting is to create an identical version in a different medium, but that’s impossible,” she said. “It’s a tongue-in-cheek way of pointing out to all of us that in this process, nothing’s going to be identical. Nothing’s ever going to be perfect.”