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
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
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
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
Jessica Lynne
"From Climate Change to Race Relations, Artists Respond to
Richmond, VA" (review)
Hyperallergic, 2015
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
Amanda Tobin Ripley and Julia Harth
Winter / Spring 2023 Learning Guide
Wexner Center for the Arts, 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
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
Conjure A Studio
Hope Ginsburg (b. 1974)
Hope Ginsburg's first studio was a table and chair under the basement steps of the house she grew up in. When she lived in New York, her studio was also her apartment, where she hosted studio visits by neatly making her bed and projecting images onto a screen in front of the couch. Over the course of her career, Ginsburg has made a studio out of many unorthodox spaces: a backyard, where beekeepers helped her fashion a beard out of bees; a Qatari desert, where she meditated in full scuba gear; and a kitchen, where she cooked up vats of wool felt to shape into large-scale sea sponges.
Ginsburg is a self-proclaimed sea sponge obsessive, and her projects have explored the sponge's biology as well as its metaphoric potential as an animal that is highly adaptable and social. Her felt sponges were developed through partnerships with marine biologists, wool vendors, felters, and natural-dye experts. She made the felt sponges collaboratively with local artists and students through workshops in Richmond, Virginia, and Porto Alegre, Brazil, where they were eventually displayed in a former thermoelectric plant.
She dreamed of "planting" her sponge operation somewhere more permanent and established the "Sponge HQ", a base of operations inside Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts. For five years, the space served as an interdisciplinary lab, workshop, and classroom, with a felting studio, aquarium, active beehive, and library. The HQ played host to a wide array of lectures and projects by students and visiting artists, and also became Ginsburg's de facto studio.
When that project was winding down, Ginsburg began to think about where she'd like to work next and whether she needed a "proper" studio at all. She'd daydream about what her fantasy studio would look like and then consider the more practical approach of taking over the guest room in her house. Perhaps her studio could be a dive shop, an outgrowth of her series Breathing on Land, offering scuba-diving gear for guided meditation sessions on land? Or should it be a more general space that various projects could flow through?
We tend to think of artists' studios as solitary spaces from which artwork emerges fully formed. But Ginsburg's practice is driven by investigation out in the world, learning by doing, and synthesizing the talents of many. What is the right kind of space for her work to happen? And what kind of studio is right for the work that you do?
Sarah Urist Green
"You Are An Artist: Assignments to Spark Creation"
Penguin Books, 2020
pp. 239–232