What am I worth? How is that measured? Alice Hope’s “True Value” installation at LongHouse, East Hampton.

‘True Value’ installation with Buckminster Fuller’s ‘Fly’s Eye Dome’ Photo: Jenny Gorman

“Well, here’s the secret. There are two things that you have to do.

One of them is to not stop, and the other one is to keep going.

But when you get there, you’ll find out that it’s still tough.”

- Frank Zappa

By JAMES SALOMON September 18th, 2025

Recently I was summoned by some friends at LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton to host an evening celebrating my old pal, Alice Hope. Alice and I met one afternoon in 2009 through our mutual friend, architect Maziar Behrooz, when immediately creative sparks started flying. The next thing I knew, she was taking over my office space in an art gallery I once had in the woods. This woman, full of ambition, cleared everything out, brought in about 600 square feet of steel sheets, about a hundred thousand magnets, and a million BBs. A million. She spent two full weeks with assistants putting this up. It was fun and fascinating and nothing like I had ever experienced. Jennifer Landes at the East Hampton Star wrote “Here and in other ways, the room shows Ms. Hope’s balancing of chance and manipulation. ‘There’s a patterning built alongside of the grid, the patterning created by pushing a handful of BBs on the magnets, and the clustering that is inherent and molecular.’ She said that she wanted there to be an interplay so that one type of pattern did not dominate the other.” The title of the article was “The Obsessive Universe of Alice Hope.” No kidding.
 

Jennifer Landes article in East Hampton Star, 2009

Since then, there have been many projects that kept her going, several of which have been documented in a recent film called “Ethereal” by renouned filmmaker, collector, and art world maven, Lana Jokel. “Ethereal” was screened at LongHouse after sunset, where we all banded together to discover or revisit her hard-won achievements. There was fresh popcorn, Twizzlers, Almond Joys and such, all the makings of a stellar Saturday movie night.

Before that happened, though, there was a thoughtful and entertaining discussion on her latest body of work called “True Value”, which consists of eight geodesic spheres made of True Value  yard sticks in a variety of monumental sizes. Some are suspended and swivel like perfectly placed Christmas ornaments (or disco balls) from LongHouse’s prized Buckminster Fuller “Fly’s Eye Dome”, which served as our backdrop. The aluminum mothership – the largest sphere --occupies the interior, like a ship in a bottle.  During the talk, I improvised a bit by opening up questioning to the well-dressed audience and started running around like Phil Donahue with my microphone. The birds were combative overhead, as an aggressive and dramatic avian collision in our airspace had the crowd gasping. Alice gave out door prizes: hand cut 6” sections from her yard stick stash, stamped with True Value, with Bud can tabs strung on ball chain. These souvenir dog tags reference her earlier work, and were proudly worn by all.

‘True Value’ installation with Buckminster Fuller’s ‘Fly’s Eye Dome’ Photo: Jenny Gorman

Through the years, I have witnessed Alice’s message as a medium, medium as a metaphor in several iterations. I am focusing less on that right now, and more on the word pairing of True + Value, in this case an investigatory sense of self, and the true value of strength and dynamics in human relationships, where, as she once described, interplay exists without one type of pattern dominating the other. Confessing my introspection to the artist, she in turn shared that she started musing on a “manifesto” based on this language.

Cheekily, I asked Alice what was her True Value. “I’m Priceless,” she beamed with a confident grin, which is exactly the mindset an artist (or anyone) needs to attain or adapt so we don’t stop and keep going.
 

Alice Hope’s ‘True Value’ manifesto (detail)

“True Value” will be on exhibit at LongHouse through October 31, 2025.

www.longhouse.org

www.alicehope.com

An exhibition on Lana Jokel’s art collection, titled “Echoes and Nostalgia”, will be on exhibit at the Bridgehampton Museum through September 21, 2025. www.bridgehamptonmuseum.org