Jim Hodges (born 1957) is an artist known for his expansive practice that incorporates found materials with more traditional media like drawing, photography and sculpture. Over the years his singular ability to infuse emotion, mystery and narrative into ordinary objects has resulted in a remarkable body of work that subtly addresses notions such as temporality, love, life, absence and other broader issues of existential nature A native of the Pacific Northwest, Hodges relocated to New York in the mid-1980s at a time where the city was simultaneously experiencing a new wave of vibrant creativity as well as the early signs of what would later become the HIV crisis.
One of Hodges's early pieces, Diary of Flowers (1994), a series of doodled paper napkins, indicated his interest in the environment and the events that surrounded him, his proclivity Sr experimentation and a desire to make powerful and yet delicate pieces, setting the template for many of his artworks to come. With time, Hodges would expand his visual vocabulary, to disassembled silk flowers, large cut-paper photographs of flowering trees, gold-leafed newspaper pages and light-filled mirror mosaics, quickly establishing himself as one of the most innovative artists from his generation.
Even in his most ambitious moments, as with the recent Unearthed (2015-present), an enormous arboreal relic he elevated to ultimate symbol of life status by casting in bronze and having exhibited on sacred ground, Hodges never betrays the humble approach and attention for traditionally overlooked materials that constituted the foundation of his practice. Almost forty years on, Hodges's acts of transmutation continue to offer other levels of interpretation and meaning.
Jim Hodges was born in Spokane, Washington. He attended Fort Wright College and went on to receive his MFA from the Pratt Institute in New York in 1986. He went on to serve as the chair of the Sculpture Department at the Yale University School of Art from 2011-12. In 2013-14 he had his first retrospective exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. His work is in some of the most important institutional collections, including the Art institute of Chicago, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.
