Today we’d like to introduce you to Ashley Hope.
Hi Ashley, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
Sure! I was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, to immigrant parents. Mother was Italian born in Italy, and my father was a Russian Jewish South African. After my mother dies of cancer– I am 13– we move to Wisconsin. I discover how amazing the American Heartland is and how incredioble the American high school experience is! I arrived during Homecoming week, and it was like moving into a Sweet Valley High teen book! Football players carrying helmets to class and cheerleaders wearing their cheer garb. Appleton, WI, offered me incredible creative opportunities that no one would expect from small town America. I traveled around the country competing in theatre. Being a young creative in America in the 1990s was full of opportunity. I hope schools still support the arts like they did then. So, when I move to NYC the summer after high school, with just $80 in my pocket, I felt fairly prepared for a life in the arts. It was the summer of 1994.
I thought I wasn’t going to go to college. Instead I went to the now defunct National Shakespeare Conservatory, and spent years just making art, doing theatre, working in bars and restaurants, and taking off for long travels on a shoe string budget. I was a creative and hooligan. By the time I was 23, I had traveled N. America, S. America, Europe East and West, North Africa, East Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia. Life was good.
But I was becoming disillusioned by acting, an art form where the artist was both the object and the commodity. I was looking for a more intellectual and self-reliant form of art. At 24, I was asked to make a statue for an off-off-broadway production, and needed some technical information (this was pre-youtube!) so took a class at Hunter College, a public school at the heart of Manhattan, known for a very strong art program. When registering for that class, I happened to notice class listings for the Problem of Evil (religion dept) and Knowledge & Reality (philosophy dept). I was like, “Ya know, I am just gonna take those classes for fun. I’m not actually gonna go to college.”
I fucking loved college classes! The deep dive into complex thoughts. The community of thinkers actively thinking. I was totally in my milieu. My Knowledge & Reality class was taught by a grad student. First day of class, getting wind he was a student himself, I asked him to step outside and I asked him, “I want the best experience I can have– the best philosophy class I can get– do you feel up to the task of teaching me this content like a pro?” Totally offended, he just said “Uuuuh, yes” and turned on his heel and went back into the classroom. 4 years later, we were married.
By the end of 2007, I was graduatiing with my MFA from Hunter College, and was showing my work with a blue chip gallery, Tilton Gallery, run by the late and wonderful Jack Tilton (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/10/arts/design/jack-tilton-dead-manhattan-gallery-owner.html). My first show was written up in Art in America, Art & Auction, amongst other publications, including many international magazines. I have my thesis text translated into Russian, French, Korean, etc.! My work is very aggressive, both formally and conceptually. The images are hard to live with, and the content hard to think about– and they are big. But for curators and collectors looking for a real statement, instead of something to hang above a couch, my work was received incredibly well. I was making money, had a waitlist, was collaborating. I was exactly where I wanted to be. Where I had worked to be.
Then the crash in 2008 happened, and art collectors pulled their pursestrings tight, and academic jobs became very hard to find. My husband got a job in Houston, Texas– a major American city, with great creative culture, and down-to-earth people. I told him to take it, knowing it was going to seriously hurt my career. But I wanted kids, and I knew Houston afforded me a quality of family life I could not offer my kids in NYC. And I knew, as a mom, I’d be all in, so my career would not be my priority anyways for a little while.
So we move to Houston, and despite my optimism, the move was VERY difficult for me. I lost access to my city, my career, my creative community, and my family in the North East. I love my kids, and being a mom, but being locked into just that role was really disorienting for me. I had to put a lot of my self-interested, hedonistic pursuits away. Maybe not all moms need to, but since I lost my mom as a kid, I knew I was going to be very very present for my children. I did incredible creative family costumes for Halloween, or dressed up in over-the-top costumes for mystery reading in their classrooms– I was such a creative mom, yes, but I was a mom, not an artist.
I did think perhaps I would teach art– keep my mind on the thing I loved so much. So I looked at the schools in Houston and found Houston City College to have the most robust and active community. The faculty and the students are really tied into the city of Houston. I began adjuncting in January 2016, and by September 2016, I was full-time. I primarily teach Painting and Digital Art, but have had other wonderful teaching oppportunities at HCC. From 2019-2021, I was positioned in the West Houston Institute at HCC as the lead faculty of a multi-disciplinary team of artists, welders, machinists, designers, automotive, ect. One of our projects was to dismantle a real ambulance and reconfigure it into an Art Car for Houston’s esteemed Art Car parade. That year we swept the awards: Artist’s Choice, People’s Choice and Judge’s Official Selection! Those three years were extremely rewarding and why I thought HCC the right fit for me; I loved making art outside of the expected channels for my industry and for a truly pedestrian audience. Art for the People is a different reward than Art for the Art World.
But I do love making art for a sophisticated audience. An artist creates a bit differently when making art for the industry devoted to undertsanding it. As my kids hit 12 and 14, I realized I could go back into my studio and start thinking deeply about my own concerns. I could start listening to my own impulses and wants/needs and start cultivating their expression again. I was nervous, but I did it. The painting currently hanging in a group show at Spring Street Studios at Sawyer Yards is the first large scale painting I had finished in 15 years. Above all, my story is the story of being a creative and a mother. Two full-time jobs that are at odds with each other. Each Creative-Parent must find their own way to fulfill their dual identity. I did the best I could.
A big part for me was really leaning into a mid-life crisis of hedonistic shenanigans. Doing the things responsible moms don’t do. Go to Austin for weekend-long EDM benders. Take off to Scotland alone for a month and advise your family to not expect any texts. Create an Online Identity that does not connect at all to your IRL one. That last shenanigan is actually a big part of my current body of work. It is allowing me to work out many concerns– new and old– that trouble and excite me, like the horrors/wonders of Social Media, the splintering of the self into an IRL you and a Virtual you, and the anxieties of entering my second half century– my youth ebbing, my death looming. I am in the beginning stages of this chapter of creativity, but I am very very excited.
My husband teaches at UH in the philosophy dept. He and I have a middle-aged garage band called The Grackles. My 14 year old, who is Eagle Scout bound, has just started at the prestigious High School of the Performing and Visual Arts for Jazz Bass, while my youngest is at Pin Oak Middle School, a pianist, a drummer, and an elite baseball player. Both great kids.
Life is still good.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Does anytone get a smooth road?! Many things affected my journey:
My mother’s illness and death very much destabilized my family and I essentially raised myself. As horrible as it sounds, I don’t know if I would change anything. My mother’s death is responsible for everything strong, resilient, and voracious about me. There is no “Carpe Diem” life lesson quite like watching a smart beautiful perosn lose their life prematurely.
I was in NYC when 9/11 happened. My sister was caught right near Ground Zero in the white debris cloud. There is no understating how completely different I am, and my life is, because of that event. Like the whole world, there is before 9/11 and after.
Oct 7th (2023) and the ongoing war in Gaza and with Iran looms huge in my psyche and heart. A lot of my family lives in Israel (my only sibling lives in Tel Aviv), and the experience of being a Jew in the world right now is markedly different than it was on Oct 6th, 2023. We are all scared, and never thought we would ever be scared like this again.
I suffer from a cyclical form of depression, on top of what I now undertsand is Chronic Post-Traumatic Syndrome. Hyper-vigilance, anxiety, and a persistant sense of doom is just a matter of existence for me. When things get overwhelming, I kind of shut down. The result is I am either INCERDIBLY on… or incredibly off. Loving myself and life… or not loving myself or life. Sigh… I guess life is a balance, and I accept that and move forward– knowing I cannot guarantee tomorrow will be all joy. But I move forward just the same. And that, in fact, is what my art is all about.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I am primarily known as a painter; my work is deeply conceptual and heavily cinematic. I am deeply imfluenced by film– David Lynch, Todd Solondz, and the likes of Bob Fosse! I like my imagery to appear as one frame in a longer cinematic narrative. Consequently, I work on a large scale.
My visuals are born out of crime scene imagery. Since I was 14 or so, I collected True Crime photography books. I was obsessed with the life/death duality present in the images. The earrings she wore that day, the tomatoes she bought on her way home, the wallpaper she chose for her kitchen… pleasant signs of life present when that life is violently and abruptly ended by the force and decision of another human being. But my fascinaton isn’t just about the victim– like all true crime afficionados, I am also interested in the perpetrator. They often describe a feeling of rage and helplessness, building inside them, and the crime is a way of releasing that tension and anguish. Suddenly they are all powerful in a universe that has been making them feel small and inconsequential.
So the crime scene photograph is a conflation of both the victim I sympathize with– she is a stand in for my mom– and the perpetrator, with whom I also sympathize. I too have felt small and inconsequential in this beautiful but brutal world. I too have wanted to lash out and establish my relevance. Don’t we all? We all want to find personal meaning in this universe, where random matter collides fortunately or unfortunately with other random matter.
But my paintings are not all angry or cynical. They do, in the end, land on acceptance. There is much beauty in my painting, alongside the anxiety. My colors are aggressive, but also full of a luscious joy; my scenes abundant with quirky humor and campy abandon. True: it might go bad tomorrow… so let us enjoy today. Buy those tomatoes, hang that wallpaper. They might be present at your unfortunate death, but even if that is the case, those are the only terms we get. My paintings are me signing the contract on a Life Embraced. I accept the terms, O Lord.
I have side bodies of work, that investigate other forms of combined joy/anxiety. My *Panties* series is about the absurdity of trying to remain civilized while denying our animal insticts, My *Best of All Possible Worlds* series is about the torture of enduring social niceties that only thinly veil a conniving and selfish social scene. But again, these works are full of paradox. I love being civilized and I love being the human animal! I love people so much, and forgive them their petty foibles born out of their needs & wants. We are all human and all alike in these ways. Let us at least laugh at the situation we’re in. These side series are like chuckles at our absurd predicaments.
How do you think about luck?
I think about the role of luck in our lives ALL THE TIME. That’s what my art is about, remember?
All our lives are made up of whatever the fate threw at us and what we make of it. I’ve had good and bad luck. Made the best out of bad situations and the worst out of great opportunities. I was once snorkling in a near empty bay in Mexico when I was hit on the head by a speeding Jet Ski. That is 100% true. Knocked my flippers and mask off and sent my body swirling through the blue. I managed to get my bearings and swim to shore, trying to keep my eyes open to make sure I didn’t pass out. When I wobbled onto the sand and explained what happened to my boyfriend, he didn’t believe me, until he felt the knot on my head. We went and got ceviche. Never occured to me that maybe I should go to the hospital and check for a concussion.
But I was fine. What luck! Imagine the jet ski had been a half second slower, so my head was a half second closer to the surface? The angle of impact would have exploded my head. Instead I have a mildly unbelieveable dinner party story.
See? Like my art posits: Random matter colliding fortunately or unfortunately with other random matter.
Pricing:
- I will not consider selling my art until I have the larger body of work complete.
- Collectors interested in buying my art are welcome to contact me and I will put them on my waitlist, first come, first serve.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://AshleyHopeArt.com
