Alice Hope is an artist who divides her time between studios in Brooklyn and East Hampton, New York. Named New York’s “Woman to Watch” in 2018 by the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Hope is widely recognized for the public and privately commissioned installations that are central to her practice. At the core of Hope’s approach in developing new bodies of work is her choice in materials with embedded cultural references and relevance. Over the past decade the can tab has been the most salient element, and she has sourced hundreds of thousands in varied branded hues. Her intricately engineered wall works - concentric coils and curtain like loops of meticulously threaded tabs -range dramatically in effect while sharing embodiments that have no beginning or end.
Hope’s interest in seine netting, a concurrent material, was prompted by a 2019 site visit to Maputo, Mozambique for an Art in Embassies commission. Inspired by the rhythmic wading seine fishermen and their heaped discarded nets in eye shot from the U.S. Embassy, she embarked on Murmuration 1, an undulating seventeen foot wall sculpture, a massive accumulation of directionally knotted Corona tabs into monofilament seine netting. In 2021, the commission was permanently installed in the Embassy; in 2022, Murmuration 2- aggregations of Coke can tabs knotted into a multifilament seine net - spilled from its wall expanse to a pelt like form on the floor- in The Church in Sag Harbor, New York. The seine net has taken on a buoyant ethereal role in recent shows- in 2022 with Guild Hall and in 2023 Drawing Room gallery ; the installations engaged the nets' negative space and shifting shadows as essential as the form.
In 2023, Hope had her first solo show that focused on recent monoprints. . The artist captured on paper the compelling three-dimensional presence and tactility of her monumental work. While traces of the can tab remain visible in her monoprints, the more prominent compositions are billowing illuminated fibrous knotted impressions of nets- floating grids embedded in deep indigo. As conceptual reference to the inherent reversal created through printmaking methods, Hope pairs images made using the front and the back of the same net. The enveloping realms of Hope’s monoprint compositions transcend the materials of their making, simultaneously evoking underwater and constellar space, and the lexicon of Modernist geometric abstraction.

Alice Hope holds an MFA from Yale University. She has exhibited widely at galleries in New York and on Eastern Long Island, and has created site-responsive works under the auspices of several public institutions. Among her many site-specific installation projects, Under the Radar was presented by the Parrish Art Museum in 2012 at Camp Hero State Park in Montauk. Subsequent projects in New York City include installations at WNYC Greene Space (2013), the Queens Museum (2015) and the Armory Show art fair (2013). In 2014-2015 she was artist in residence at New York’s Museum of Art and Design. In 2018 her work was the subject of a one-person exhibition at Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton, and in 2022 the museum presented her site specific installations in an off site exhibit at the historic Amagansett Life Saving Station. She is currently working on two public commissions - in Washington DC and Brooklyn- made with blue tape.