Lisa Hoke

Lisa Hoke, Light My Fire, site-specific installation, paper and glue, 40' × 20', 2006, Rice University Moody Arts Center, Houston, TX.

Lisa Hoke (born 1952) is an American visual artist based in New York City and Hudson Valley, New York. 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. Her work has often challenged notions of mastery, permanence and fixed meaning, embracing qualities such as contingency and transience. 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. 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. 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.

Hoke has been recognized by the Joan Mitchell Foundation, American Academy of Arts and Letters and National Academy of Design. She has exhibited at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Holly Solomon Gallery, Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, North Carolina Museum of Art, In 1980 she moved to New York City, occupying the SoHo studio that she would work from for over forty years. 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. 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. These sculptures and installations utilized unmistakable household and auto-part detritus conveying usage and the chaos of real life. 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.

Lisa Hoke, Manifold Destiny, mufflers and pink and yellow webbing, 10' x 5', 1991. 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. 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. Hoke reworked the piece at the Katonah Museum of Art (2005) and in a two-story, six-year installation at the New Britain Museum (2008).

Hoke created four versions (of up to 75 feet long) of her first-such work, Love, American Style (2011–2), at MASS MoCA, Elizabeth Harris, J. Johnson Gallery and D'Amour Museum of Fine Arts. In 2018, the Italian coffee company Lavazza commissioned Hoke to create the site-specific Dolce Croma for the showroom and lobby of its new headquarters in Turin, Italy. The flora and fauna-like forms of the 51-foot installation were formed out of bright packaging materials from throughout the company's history. Her work belongs to the public art collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, National Academy of Design, New York Public Library, D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts, Johnson Museum of Art, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, New Orleans Museum of Art, Oklahoma City Museum of Art, and Orlando Museum of Art, as well as corporate collections.