Stephen Hayes was born in North Carolina and raised to believe anything is possible. His artistic interests and skills were formed in childhood when his mother, Lender, gave him a full-size workbench and encouraged him to get creative with old mechanical parts she brought home from work.
Hayes’s current work fuses the past and the present. The common thread is capitalism, the commodification of human beings, and the subsequent brainwashing effects. Recurring imagery creates a thread between individual pieces in his repertoire and lets him speak directly to more significant societal issues rooted in society's racial structuring.