Catalogues and Exhibition Texts — click thumbnails to read

Anaïs Duplan, Hope Ginsburg, Melody Jue, Jennifer Lange

Meditation Ocean (gallery guide)

Wexner Center for the Arts, 2023

Sarah Howard

"Sponge Exchange, Hope Ginsburg" (exhibition text)

University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, 2020

Denise Markonish
"Explode Every Day: An Inquiry into the Phenomena of Wonder" (excerpt from catalog essay)
MASS MoCA, 2016
pp. 50–51

Jennifer Lange
"Land Dive Team: Bay of Fundy" (exhibition text)
THE BOX, Wexner Center for the Arts, 2016

Sarah Demeuse
"Weather Permitting" (catalog entry)
9th Mercosul Biennial, 2013
pp. 308–311

Regine Basha
"Hope Ginsburg" (catalog essay)
CUE Art Foundation, 2011
pp. 6–7

Emily Sessions
"Hope Ginsburg" (catalog essay)
CUE Art Foundation, 2011
pp. 21–25

Jennifer Kollar
"Factory Direct: New Haven" (catalog entry)
Artspace, 2005

Helen Molesworth
"Work Ethic" (catalog entry)
Baltimore Museum of Art, 2003
pp. 147–148

Larissa Harris
"Heart of Gold" (excerpt from catalog essay)
PS1, 2002
pp. 3–5

Omer Fast
"Fido Television" (excerpt from catalog essay)
Hunter College Times Square Art Gallery, 2000

Articles and Reviews — click thumbnails to read

Annie Dell'Aria

"Deep Breathing: Annie Dell'Aria on Meditation Ocean"

Artforum, May 2023

Pablo Helguera

"Reading Assignments: Books that artists study, reference, and base works on."

Beautiful Eccentrics

August 18, 2022

Lynn Trimble

"New Generation of Land Artists Embodies a Call for Action"

Hyperallergic

July 14, 2022


Jennifer Lange

Film/Video Studio Journals: Hope Ginsburg

In Practice, Wexner Center for the Arts

Fall 2021

Emma Colón
"5 Artists Bridging Communities Across Difference"
A Blade of Grass Magazine
March 28, 2019

Leila Ugincius
"Optimistic and Tragic: A Glimpse of Coral Restoration"
VCU News
March 26, 2019

Sydney Cologie and Brynne McGregor
"Wex Moments 2018: Film/Video Studio artist Hope Ginsburg" (Q&A)
Wexner Center for the Arts
December 26, 2018

Tim Dodson
"Performative Diving Piece Featured at Festival Honoring the James River"
Richmond Times-Dispatch
June 9, 2018

Karen Newton
"Deep Dive: Artist Hope Ginsburg Becomes One with the Sea"
Style Weekly, June 2018

Jessica Lynne
"From Climate Change to Race Relations, Artists Respond to Richmond, VA" (review)
Hyperallergic, 2015

Lauren O'Neill-Butler
"Hope Ginsburg CUE Art Foundation" (review)
Artforum, Summer 2011

Gary Robertson

"Art Students Find Inspiration in the Lab"

VCU News Center, 2010

T.J. Demos
"Work Ethic" (review)
Artforum, February 2004

Books — click thumbnails to read

Sarah Urist Green

"You Are An Artist: Assignments to Spark Creation"

Penguin Books, 2020

pp. 239–232

Corina L. Apostol and Nato Thompson, Editors

"Making Another World Possible: 10 Creative Time Summits, 10 Global Issues, 100 Art Projects"

Routledge, 2020

pp. 277–278

Akiko Busch

"How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency"

Penguin Books, 2019

pp. 199–200

Educational Materials — click thumbnails to read

Amanda Tobin Ripley and Julia Harth

Winter / Spring 2023 Learning Guide

Wexner Center for the Arts, 2023

Videos — click thumbnails to view

VCUarts Lecture Series: Hope Ginsburg

Institute for Contemporary Art

Richmond, VA 

October 3, 2023

Land Dive Team: Amphibious James

Television Program is a Production of VPM

Producer/Director: Mason Mills

Producer/Field Director: Allison Benedict

September 22, 2019

Conjure a Studio – Hope Ginsburg
The Art Assignment
PBS Digital Studios, 2016

The Art of Pedagogy – Hope Ginsburg

Creative Time Summit

Venice Biennale, 2015

Art and Education in the 21st Century
Panelists: John Brown-Executive Director, Windgate Foundation; Tom Finkelpearl-Commissioner, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs; Hope Ginsburg-Artist and Educator; Moderator: Geoffrey Cowan- President, The Annenberg Foundation Trust
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, 2014

Heart of Gold: a Guide (excerpt)


Hope Ginsburg’s project, Designtex, Climatex ® Lifecycle™ (2002) introduces a biodegradable fabric produced at the upholstery firm where she works into the context of an art exhibition. You might assume, based on many other artists’ projects which deal with corporate commerce, that this is an attempt at fighting the corporate system from the inside. But the presentation is not for the purposes of critique; nor is it a case of “because I am an artist, whatever I do is art.” It’s more as if Ginsburg is saying, “because I am an artist, I know what art is.” The fact that she has discovered art within the corporate context does not dismay her. With an elegant demonstration of the fabric’s properties via a display unit/compost bin and upholstered benches, Ginsburg provokes us into questioning our received ideas about the limits of the corporate.


(catalog text)


Heart of Gold is made up of seven very different works which appeal to the eye, the ear, and the intellect. The works reflect on and re-create the desire produced by (among other things) contemporary capitalism, without relinquishing an understanding of the system’s exploitative structure and our own implication in it. Without overlapping in medium or even, necessarily, intention, together they make us think about how lucky and damning it is to be American.


In Katrin Asbury’s From the Dream Life of Lila Acheson Wallace (2002), a life-size carved gerenuk (a type of antelope) stands on its hind legs nibbling at a bouquet of flowers in what appears to be the lobby of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Dream Life (whose title makes tribute to the philanthropist among whose contributions to the Metropolitan was an endowment earmarked for these flowers) is a classic dream-image, simultaneously simple and pregnant. It is too reductive to say that that creature symbolizes the viewer? Maybe. But I know that when I visit the Met that’s what I become: innocent, barbaric and feeling so strongly about those priceless possessions that I want to eat them.


Anissa Mack’s I’m Like You, Do You Like Me? (2002) fixes the bandanna within the American pantheon of icons. To do so, Mack learned the craft of stained glass, the ultimate “elevated” medium, whose reliable magic is no less magical for its reliability. To portray an American symbol in an exalted “European” medium - like a robber baron building a Tudor mansion - is a classic act of American myth-making. From the conquest of the West to the rock-and-roll star, this myth-making has, of course, been inextricable from money-making; and through it all, the bandanna has retained its buccaneer spirit.


One of my favorite public projects ever is Chris Doyle’s Commutable (1996), an anti-heroic tribute to contemporary and historic New York. In collaboration with the Public Art Fund, Doyle gilded the gritty steps of the Manhattan approach to the Williamsburg bridge with $7500.00 worth of gold. This was one of the first contemporary art projects to ever intrude on my consciousness, and it did so due to a very direct kind of magic (by which other works in this exhibition function as well). Commutable’s generous gesture is to make a reality out of a dream.


Noah Sheldon’s Winning (2001) was recorded in a casino – one of the places where emotional involvement in cash-flow is most cynically exploited. We hear hundreds of slot machines making their appeal and the occasional extended flow of quarters into a cup: a continuing jangle that’s instantly recognizable but also somehow exalted. In another exhibition, Sheldon, experimenting with synaesthesia – the effect of one sense on another – had visitors wear headphones to hear Winning while viewing work by the other artists in the show. In this exhibition, the piece, like a soundtrack for a film, carves out and seals a space, inflecting it with a heightened sense of possibility in a minor key.


While these works appeal to the senses - like luxury itself - this exhibition is not an investigation of decadence. Decadence implies a cynical, privileged position outside society; the artists in Heart of Gold are passionately involved in daily life, and their involvement is located precisely in their capacity as practitioners of art. To them, art is that which is “expansive,” as Hope Ginsburg puts it, or, as Peter Walsh says, that which ‘squares’ and ‘cubes’ cultural value.”


Peter Walsh’s Hoard (2002) takes the form of an annotated bibliography, bound and available for consultation on a library stand. It’s a comically ambitious and varied collection of visual and written materials (an advertising executive talking passionately about Mr. Peanut; lyrics from Ginger Rogers’ pig-latin rendition of “We’re in the Money” from the film Gold-Diggers of 1933 (1933); references to Georg Simmel, Karl Marx and P.T. Barnum) that inquire into and serve as examples of how value is created, managed, conserved and negotiated.


If you page through the Hoard, you’ll see how central these functions are to human society throughout history, and come across some choice examples from contemporary capitalist culture, whose unhinged and heartless energy has created unprecedented connections between desire and the flow of capital.


Hope Ginsburg’s project, Designtex, Climatex ® Lifecycle™ (2002) introduces a biodegradable fabric produced at the upholstery firm where she works into the context of an art exhibition. You might assume, based on many other artists’ projects which deal with corporate commerce, that this is an attempt at fighting the corporate system from the inside. But the presentation is not for the purposes of critique; nor is it a case of “because I am an artist, whatever I do is art.” It’s more as if Ginsburg is saying, “because I am an artist, I know what art is.” The fact that she has discovered art within the corporate context does not dismay her. With an elegant demonstration of the fabric’s properties via a display unit/compost bin and upholstered benches, Ginsburg provokes us into questioning our received ideas about the limits of the corporate.


With its implied consciousness of economic structures, the work in Heart of Gold could not have existed without the 30-year history of “institutional critique,” as described in Bennett Simpson’s essay in this publication. Simpson describes how artists working in this vein attempted to “investigate the specific ideological parameters of a site (a museum, a city, a national arts policy, a cultural context, ...etc),” revealing their hidden economic and ideological support structures. The artists in Heart of Gold emerge from this legacy while speaking through their own embeddedness and implication in economic power.


Eleanor Antin’s 1974 video The Ballerina and the Bum serves as a touchstone for the exhibition. In the video, an early incarnation of this seminal feminist’s ballerina alter-ego – dressed, naturally, in a white tutu and tights – plans to walk across the United States to “make it in the Big City.” She meets a bum on a stalled freight train, and they discuss strategies for success. The humor in Antin’s portrayal of her ballerina’s dedication to her dream; her playfulness with American mythology, and her ballerina’s innocence and spunk as she practices her positions echo in the heartfelt investigations and ambitions of the new projects.

Larissa Harris
"Heart of Gold" (excerpt from catalog essay)
PS1, 2002
pp. 3–5