Capp Street Project: Jim Hodges

Renowned New York sculptor, illustrator and photographer Jim Hodges will spend this coming spring in the Bay Area through the Capp Street Residency Program at the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC). As artist-in-residence at CCAC's Oakland campus, Hodges will both create new works of art and share his approach to art making with CCAC students and faculty. An exhibit of his new work will open at CCAC's Oliver Art Center, Oakland, in April 2000.

Hodges' approachable, highly labor-intensive and often very beautiful work is concerned with the personal and emotional side of life: his pieces examine and question the essence of memory, time, relationships, loss and place. In a recent New York Times interview, Hodges noted "When I make art, I think about its ability to connect with others, to bring them into the process." Starting with common, everyday materials – napkins, mirrors, silk flowers – Hodges creates art that imbues them with striking and poetic new meanings while maintaining their original identity. His work has been described as romantic, humane, even delicate.

Typical of the deceptively simple beauty of Hodges' work is Landscape, 1998, an autobiographical series of 16 handmade shirts, in minutely diminishing size, placed one inside the next, so that only the rims of the collars and the final shirt are visible. At its core lies a soft baby jacket, at its outermost, a plain white man's dress shirt. The shirt collars, each made from a different material, create a timeline of concentric rings, traveling through the eras of Hodges' life. Landscape leaves the viewer with a sense of time and personal history, and a vague, wistful nostalgia.

Jim Hodges' work has been widely shown in both individual and group exhibits, in the United States as well as Europe. Most recently he has had solo exhibitions at the Miami Art Museum; Camargo Vilaça, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; CRG Gallery, New York City; the Kemper Museum, Kansas City; and Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot, Paris. In 1999 his work has been included in several group exhibitions, including Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late 20th Century, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Collectors Collect Contemporary: 1990-1999, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and Fresh Flowers, Bellevue Art Museum, Bellevue, WA. His work was last seen in the Bay Area as part of the exhibit Present Tense: Nine Artists in the Nineties at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1997. Hodges received a BFA from Fort Wright College in Spokane, WA, in 1980 and an MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, in 1986.

Capp Street Project
Jim Hodges