In December 1980, students at Dallas's Hockaday School walked past a strange low aluminum ring on the lawn outside their entrance, and most of them disliked what they saw. The work — Smoke Rings: Two Concentric Circles Skewed, Non-Communicating — was a sculpture by Bruce Nauman, then little known in Texas, installed by a young gallerist, Carol Taylor, for the opening exhibition of her new Dallas gallery. A photograph of Nauman crouched beside the work still made it into that year's school yearbook. The sculpture consisted of two 15-foot cast-aluminum circles, quartered into sections and set askew in a black satin patina, standing just 21 inches high on shims above the grass. The V-shaped open segments faced one another without ever lining up, so a viewer could look through one tunnel into the other but never cross between them. Nauman had begun the Smoke Rings series in 1977 to explore tunnels whose interiors can be seen while their exteriors can only be inferred — a contrast of inside and outside that he would return to for decades. Taylor, a former debutante who had worked at New York's Parasol Press in the 1960s, had spotted a Nauman print on a trip to Santa Fe and decided to give the artist his Dallas debut at her new gallery, with permission from Leo Castelli's gallery. The outdoor piece stayed up for six weeks; the reception, in Taylor's own words, was hostile — though she mounted a second Nauman show in 1983, this time confined indoors. Now the Nasher Sculpture Center has built Bruce Nauman: Identical, the first Nauman exhibition organized by a Texas museum, around that forgotten episode. Organized by curator Leigh Arnold with Nasher director Carlos Basualdo — who curated Nauman's 2009 Venice Biennale presentation — it reworks the artist's 2024 New York show Begin Again: suspended polyurethane, silicone-rubber and plaster-cast taxidermy molds of coyotes and foxes hang alongside silverpoint and goldpoint drawings of the same molds, once again showing an object's interior while its exterior is on display. The title is Nauman's wry acknowledgment that casting can never make anything truly identical. On view through March 21, 2027.