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

Hope Ginsburg’s artwork takes numerous forms. She worked with a beekeeper learning how to make honey; she auditioned to be a saleswoman on the QVC television network; she has made handmade felt mittens; she works in a design firm; and, recently, she produced small novelty items, such as temporary tattoos. As disparate as this list might appear, issues of performance crop up consistently in Ginsburg’s oeuvre. She is always a primary actor/figure in her work, which itself is an ongoing exploration of the porous boundary between art and life.


The Bearded Lady project began in 1998 when Ginsburg, professing a lifelong love of bees, found a mentor in beekeeper Francis Bowen. As Bowen’s apprentice, Ginsburg assisted him at lectures, at state fairs, and in the garden. As trust and friendship grew between them, Ginsburg began to inquire about the phenomenon of bee beards–an old American picnic or state fair trick in which a swarm of bees forms a beard on a performer’s chin. The bees will swarm to protect the queen of their hive, and once attached to the cage, they form a protective phalanx or “beard.” Ginsburg worked with Bowen and apiarist Jim Gray on developing the proper antibodies for bee stings (which requires being stung repeatedly over time) so that she could perform the Bearded Lady trick.


Recorded on video, and subsequently rendered into a lovely faux-Victorian label for her own brand of honey (“Bearded Lady”), Ginsburg’s “performance” culminated in a successful bee beard. The work is ongoing: Ginsburg still produces Bearded Lady honey, which can be purchased directly from the artist or in gift shops in institutions where the artist exhibits her work.


Bearded Lady can be understood within the tradition of task-based performance inasmuch as the artist is led by her own desires and interests to create a task for herself, which she subsequently completes. Historically, artists interested in task-based performances treated their artistic process as vastly more interesting and important than the final product or result. Ginsburg does, however, produce a product, one readily bought and sold on the market, and one that is a usable commodity: honey. Traditionally, Process art was conceived of as a way to undermine the capitalist demand for art to be a profitable product. In the Bearded Lady project, Ginsburg tackles this demand from a different angle. Given that so much task-based work and Process art of the 1960s was subsequently commodified through the production of relics and documentation, Ginsburg’s production of a commodity acts as a sort of “first strike.” Here the artist offers up a handmade commodity, one meant to be ingested by the viewer, as a kind of homeopathic remedy for the inevitable commodity status of art.


In her exploration of the performative quality of art and the slippage between the spaces of art and everyday life, Ginsburg is currently at work producing small novelties of the sort found in Cracker Jack boxes. Entitled The Novelty Project (2002–2003), the first works are temporary tattoos designed to be purchased at a nominal cost and worn by the viewer. The Little Black Moustache is a pencil-thin vaudevillesque moustache tattoo. Clearly a play on Coco Chanel’s enduring gift to women’s fashion, this moustache functions as a playful reconfiguration of face and gender. When it is worn, the viewer/wearer is thrown into a space of heightened self-awareness, open to innumerable questions from friends, family, and mere passersby. The Little Black Moustache is accompanied by the Rosy Red Cheek tattoos, bright red circles in the vein of Raggedy Ann. Ginsburg advises, “They’re for flirty days, when the elegance of the Little Black Moustache is too severe.”[1]


[1] Hope Ginsburg, correspondence with the author, Summer 2002.

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