Lisa Hoke (born 1952) is an American visual artist based in New York City and Hudson Valley, New York.Sisto, Elena. "'Unmitigated, Unknowable Joy': A Studio Visit with Lisa Hoke", artcritical, June 16, 2015. Retrieved August 18, 2021.Butler, Sharon. "Commission: Lisa Hoke at Lavazza," Two Coats of Paint, May 21, 2018. Retrieved August 18, 2021. She is known for colorful, immersive installations and abstract sculptures characterized by labor-intensive working processes and inventive use of repurposed consumer detritus as raw materials.Johnson, Ken. "Lisa Hoke," The New York Times, February 12, 1999, p.E39.Princenthal, Nancy. "Lisa Hoke", Art in America, March 2009, p. 147.Grissom, Wesley. "Material Girl Lisa," Arbus Magazine, December 2011/January 2012, p. 26–33. Her work has often challenged notions of mastery, permanence and fixed meaning, embracing qualities such as contingency and transience.Horodner, Stuart. "By the Dozens: Lisa Hoke," Surface Magazine, March 2001, p. 92–4.Cotter, Holland, "Arts in review: Lisa Hoke," The New York Times, December 2, 1994, p. C19. Retrieved August 17, 2021. In early sculptures, she tested gravity and balance with intuitively arranged, tenuous suspensions; her later large-scale installations are created on-site and dismantled after exhibition, their materials saved for future re-use.Donegan, Cheryl. Review, Tema Celeste, Winter 1993, p. 71.Dougherty, Linda Johnson. "Lisa Hoke," "0-60: The Experience of Time through Contemporary Art", Raleigh, NC: North Carolina Museum of Art, 2013, p. 86. Hoke first gained recognition in the 1990s as one of a number of sculptors that mined the domestic sphere for materials and ideas, in her case, mixing elements of formalism and postminimalism, Pop assemblage, and social, often feminist, commentary.Canning, Susan, M. "Lisa Hoke," New Art Examiner, April 1995, p. 40.Heartney, Eleanor. "Brad Kahlhamer, Lisa Hoke and Leonardo Drew at the Thread Waxing Space," Art in America, May 1992, p. 136–7.Clifford, Katie. "Lisa Hoke," New Art Examiner, May 1999, p. 58. In the 2000s, critics have compared the bright, swirling forms and textures of her installations to the varied surfaces of Antoni Gaudí and the sparkling patterns of Seurat and Klimt.Cohen, David. "Lisa Hoke: The Gravity of Color" The New York Sun, December 16, 2004, p. 17. Retrieved August 18, 2021.Westfall, Stephen. "The Rapture of Excess," Oklahoma City: Oklahoma City Museum of Art, 2013.
Hoke has been recognized by the Joan Mitchell Foundation, American Academy of Arts and Letters and National Academy of Design.Joan Mitchell Foundation. Lisa Hoke, Supported Artists. Retrieved August 18, 2021.American Academy of Arts and Letters. "2016 Art Award Winners." Retrieved August 18, 2021.National Academy of Design. "National Academy Inducts Largest Class in 25 Years, Fifth Largest Class in History," November 13, 2018. Retrieved August 18, 2021. She has exhibited at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art,Brenson, Michael. "In the Arena of the Mind, at the Whitney," The New York Times, October 19, 1990, p. C33. Retrieved August 17, 2021. Holly Solomon Gallery,D'Souza, Aruna. "Lisa Hoke at Holly Solomon," Art in America, October 1999, p. 157–8. Oklahoma City Museum of Art,McDonnell, Brandy. "'Come on Down': New York sculptor Lisa Hoke creates large-scale works from paper cups, popcorn boxes and other recycled materials,” The Oklahoman, December 13, 2013. Retrieved August 18, 2021. Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art,Princenthal, Nancy. "Paper. The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art", Art on Paper, July-August 2001, p. 70. North Carolina Museum of Art, and New Museum. Her work belongs to the collections of the Whitney, Johnson Museum of Art and New Orleans Museum of Art, among others.Whitney Museum of American Art. Lisa Hoke, Magnet, Collection. Retrieved August 18, 2021.Johnson Museum of Art. Raised Hackles, Lisa Hoke, Collection. Retrieved August 18, 2021.
Biography Hoke was born in Virginia Beach, Virginia in 1952.Bennet, Steve. "From the Discarded Comes Art," San Antonio Express, November 28, 2012. Retrieved August 18, 2021. Her father was a navy test pilot; the experience of his work influenced her future sculptural interests in balance, gravity and the contrast between earthbound and airborne forms.Sussler, Betsy. "Lisa Hoke," Bomb, Spring 1990, p. 66–8. She earned a BA in English from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1974, then became interested in art and enrolled at Virginia Commonwealth University (BFA, 1978) and graduate studies at Florida State University.Cahill, Patricia. "'Love, American Style,' by Lisa Hoke on Display at D'Amour Museum of Fine Arts in Springfield," MassLive, May 10, 2012. Retrieved August 18, 2021. In 1980 she moved to New York City, occupying the SoHo studio that she would work from for over forty years.
Work and reception
Hoke's work has been largely driven by her progression through a range of unexpected, often quirky raw materials—auto parts, textiles and domestic objects, consumer detritus and packaging—and the intuitive processes she has discovered for transforming them.Bowles, K. Johnson. "Straw into Gold," Fiberarts, January/February 2000, p 35–40. Her spare, near-monochrome, early constructions in cast iron, steel and wire explored traditional sculptural issues involving balance, mass and space, while also engaging two-dimensional drawing issues. Her turn to repurposed consumer objects, however, introduced the broader color spectrum into her practice, directing her focus toward painterly concerns with chroma, pattern and surface in work that drew comparisons to Jessica Stockholder. This shift was signaled by the transitional sculpture Malaprop (1990), in which she sewed two polka-dotted shower curtains together and suspended fifty pounds of steel from them.Faust, Gretchen. Review, Arts, April 1992, p. 84. Hoke's later mural-installations continue the painterly shift to an even greater degree, influenced by the bright excesses of her chosen raw material—recycled consumer packaging.
Earlier sculpture (1980s–1998) Hoke gained early recognition for acrobatic, unwelded wire and metal suspensions of cast objects that explored balance, gravity, aerodynamics and the activation of voids in space.Kachur, Lewis. "Overwhelming the Gallery Cube", Art International, Spring, p. 71–2. Critic Lucy Lippard wrote that these pieces sketched barely visible energy patterns and posed weighty questions about physical reality using minimal means (e.g., Magnet, 1989), a quality she likened to Eva Hesse works that "endow[ed] formal austerity with subtle emotional resonance."Lippard, Lucy. "Waiting to See", Awards in the Visual Arts 9, Winston-Salem, NC: Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art.Zimmer, William. "A Private and Passionate Taste for the Contemporary," The New York Times, August 20, 1990, Sect. 12CN, p. 26. Retrieved August 17, 2021. The sculptures Eclipse and Levee (both 1987) cradled fruit forms made from green sand castings in small wire slings held mid-air in taut, uncertain balance by stretched cables and simple steel forms; for Equilibrium (1990), Hoke created a ceiling-bound, tangled cloud of wire that was hoisted by a hand-shaped counterweight across the room.Mahoney, Robert. "Lisa Hoke," Sculpture, May/June 1988, p. 35.Raynor, Vivien. "The First Rule Is 'Break The Rules,'" The New York Times, October 11, 1987, p. NJ11. Retrieved August 17, 2021. Reviews in Arts and Art International related the gestural effect and graphic presence of such work to the concept of drawing in space associated with modernist sculptors Julio González and David Smith, among others.Cyphers, Peggy. Review, Arts, January 1990, p. 95.
In the 1990s, critics such as Eleanor Heartney noted Hoke's shift toward denser, more playful hanging pieces that reworked the low-brow, recycled junk aesthetic of Pop assemblage and Arte Povera through a process-oriented, feminist sensibility.Harris, Jane. "Making It", Review, February 1, 1998, p. 37.Zimmer, William. "Honoring Women as Keepers of the Home," The New York Times, October 20, 1999, p. WC13. Retrieved August 17, 2021. These sculptures and installations utilized unmistakable household and auto-part detritus conveying usage and the chaos of real life.Leigh, Christian. "The Day After Today," Sculpture: Brad Kahlhamer, Lisa Hoke, Leonardo Drew, New York: Thread Waxing Space, 1992. Retrieved September 21, 2021. The random color of the new materials reoriented Hoke toward chroma and texture; their status as functional objects introduced new, open-ended social and psychological shadings in her work: a sense of folly and the conditionality of existence, intimations of emotional stress, and commentary on domestic work that mixed obsessiveness with undercurrents of danger and disorder.Hess, Elizabeth. "Materialized Girls," The Village Voice, April 20, 1993, p. 65.Corrin, Lisa Graziose. "Hanging by a Thread," Loose Threads, London: Serpentine Gallery, 1998. Retrieved September 21, 2021.
The sculpture Manifold Destiny (1991) was a notable example—a hanging assemblage of yellow and pink plastic patio furniture stripping increasingly entangled in rusted car mufflers and snaking exhaust pipes that suggested entropy. Tema Celeste described it as a funny and frightening "Medusa in curlers … at once vulnerable and threatening, delicate and Herculean." In shows at the Corcoran Gallery of Art (1992), Horodner Romley (1993, 1994) and Serpentine Gallery (London, 1998), domestic materials—thread, buttons, zippers, totems of colorful, stiff shirt sleeves, and shower curtains—predominated in works that employed an abstract sensibility and more airy, intuitive forms of weaving.Sultan, Terrie. Reverberations: L.C. Armstrong, Michèle Blondel, Suzan Etkin, Lisa Hoke, Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1992. Retrieved September 21, 2021.Melrod, George. "New York", Sculpture, March/April 1995, p. 38.Kent, Sarah. "Thread bare," Time Out (London), September 2, 1998. Heirloom (1994) consisted of skeins of colored thread that were tossed, fixed and installed in vertical fans of dense, lacy patterning across two corner walls, then connected by single threads to cast wax detergent bottle and household forms on the floor. Critics likened the 12-foot work's appearance to "a grandmother's unraveled afghan," sea corals or tangled hair and its calligraphic patterns and process to Abstract Expressionism, a debt referenced in the double meaning of its title.Zimmer, William. "From Unorthodox Material to Sculpture," The New York Times, March 13, 1994, Sect. 13CN, p. 20. Retrieved August 17, 2021.
Installations and sculpture (1999– ) Beginning in the late 1990s, Hoke increasingly focused on abstract installations of hanging forms, mosaic-like panels, and sculptural murals, using consumer detritus and commercial packaging as raw materials.Johnson, Ken. "Luscious," The New York Times, January 14, 2000, p.E39.Levin, Kim. "Voice Choices", The Village Voice, February 8, 2000. These were often site-specific, temporary works—many larger than Hoke's studio space—which she executed without pre-drawings or knowledge of outcomes, giving them a performative aspect.
For Ricochet (Holly Solomon, 1999), Hoke filled the gallery with kite-like polyester sheets embedded with multi-colored neon drinking straws; they were suspended within a network of colored string that ran far across ceilings, walls and floors before converging on and attaching to a set of cast-iron vegetable counterweights on the floor. Reviews in the New York Times and New Art Examiner compared the sheets to stained glass, stage sets and fantastical tapestries, their absurdity tempered by the Rube Goldberg-like intricacy of the installation and formal tension between playful sculptural forms and gallery architecture.