Artist of the Week: Hope Dworkin ’26 on Sculpture, Being a Student First, and Music Appreciation

Hope Dworkin ’26 has always loved abstract art. “In school, everyone [would say] ‘Oh, I could make that,’” they said. “I always got frustrated because I would [think], ‘No, you can’t,’ but I didn’t know how to verbalize it when I was ten years old.”

Not everyone is defending Rothko in elementary school, but it makes sense for Hope. They started as a viewer of art, growing up in New York with parents who liked going to gallery shows. It was just a matter of chance that they ended up liking the works their parents exposed them to. They said, “I have very similar tastes to my parents in a lot of things, in art and music and movies.” 

Yet as a kid, Hope hated making art. “I felt like I was surrounded by people who were very creative,” they said. “A lot of my friends were very talented musicians, and others would all [make] these crazy doodles. I was never interested in that. I just wasn’t moved to create art.”

All this changed once they came to Swarthmore. In the spring of their first year, they needed a fourth credit, and decided to take sculpture I. “It totally rocked my world,” they said. “I haven’t looked back.”

On the first day of class, Assistant Professor of Art Jody Joyner shared her own experience: randomly taking a sculpture class as an undergraduate, falling in love with it, and ultimately becoming a sculptor. Hope said, “I was sitting there, [thinking] that’s hilarious, that’s a great story, but that’s never going to happen to me. And then it did.”

Now, as a senior, Hope is an honors art history major and studio art minor. Their senior studio in Whittier is papered with prints, including a comic about modern art by Adam Reinhardt, a picture of the inside of Freud’s home, an annotated photocopy of a Soviet critical essay in art, and an extended Nietzsche quotation. The quotation is from “The Gay Science,” Aphorism #276: “For the new year … I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.” Growing up, the same quote was on Hope’s refrigerator back home.

They said, “I took a class on pessimist philosophy in high school because I had an amazing English teacher. Nietzsche’s brand of pessimism always appealed to me because he was like, ‘Yeah, the world is shit and you should recognize that and live with that, but you can’t negate your life.’”

Before they discovered sculpture, or even considered themselves to be an artist, Hope had a wood shop in their room as a kid. They got really into woodworking, so their parents bought them saws. “I had no skill and no knowledge,” they said. “I was sawing wood in my room and trying to make things. I didn’t know what I was doing. It was all hand saws, and I was a shrimpy little kid. I struggled a lot with the physical act of making, and it became frustrating.”

Despite having an early desire to create, they didn’t know that same practice could be artmaking. In their first  year, they rediscovered this passion. “I look back on the work that I made in intro sculpture, and I [wonder], what are they [Hope] thinking? It was not inspired, but I really loved making it,” they said.

Last semester, Hope made a “really large steel bench.” They said, “It was really awesome to be able to do [the bench], but then I got to senior year and I was like, I need to make a lot of stuff.” This semester, they began printmaking as a way to emphasize replication and repetition. 

Hope’s work is informed by process. “I want to use a sculpture to learn how to do something new,” they said. “I’m also invested in mechanical movement. I love machines [and] figuring out how they work.”

Almost all of their ideas come to them when they’re bored. “Unfortunately, sometimes that [happens] in a classroom setting,” they said. “Apologies to all my professors.” Hope prefers to have many works-in-progress. Lately, they’ve been obsessed with Rube Goldberg machines, which are chain reaction-type contraptions designed to perform a simple task in a complicated way. They showed me their own version of it, which is a “self-contained Rube Goldberg machine, within a frame.” 

Their process often begins with a drawing, or with a maquette — a preliminary physical model of a sculpture. “I might make it, and then remake it,” they said. “It could take a week or six months from start-to-finish. It really is not a precise science.”

Most of their work is form-based, even when it is two-dimensional. Their prints feature visual depictions of scaffolding, partially inspired by their research from last summer, when Hope worked to build a history of scaffolding in New York City. Half of the floor space in their studio is covered by a giant print depiction of Clothier Hall’s scaffolding before it was renovated in the 1980s. 

Hope said, “I’m interested in industrial forms and processes, the idea of repeating something over and over and over again as a very industrial way of working [while] also using images that communicate industrial forms at the same time.”

Studying abroad in Italy helped further their understanding of the relationship between two-dimensional and three-dimensional spaces. Though they quickly dived into sculpture at Swarthmore, they always felt insecure about their dislike and supposed inability to draw. In Italy, they took a drawing class for the first time, “jumping in the deep end,” as they put it. And it paid off: “I was like, oh, I really love to draw,” they said. “If you just devote a little time every day to drawing, you get better, it’s kind of incredible.”

Hope pointed out a few representations of sculptures in drawings by artists like Ruth Asawa, Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt), and Antony Gormley, all pinned on their studio walls. They said, “I’m always thinking about how the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional are related, it’s a perennial question in sculpture, drawing, and painting.”

Hope emphasized the need to devote large quantities of time to merely learning how to do something on a technical level. “I spent a year learning how to weld,” they said. “It is such a time commitment. You’re never truly comfortable with the process you’re doing.” As a result of their process-based practice, Hope still hesitates to call themselves an artist. To them, being a student comes first, and they say it might stay that way: “In a lot of ways, we’re thankfully sheltered [as students]. We’re given resources and time and all of these things to kind of take it to the max.”

Though they evidently make art, they also study art history. Perhaps not unsurprisingly, these two areas of engagement with art are sometimes classified as “two distinct things,” rendering it difficult to engage with art and art theory at once. Hope recalled an art history class with Assistant Professor Paloma Checa-Gismero that discussed this idea. “Over history, there are all these people [who tried to] change that dynamic, or think about a different way to think about it that isn’t so art against craft.” They reference a critical essay about art on their wall by Vladimir Tatlin, a Soviet post-revolutionary constructivist who delved into the issue of art being alienated from itself. 

Hope added, “[Constructivists] are focused on engagement, the idea you need to go and work in the factory with the people who are making stuff, and you need to not close yourself off to other kinds of art.” It was influential for their ideas on their own cross-disciplinary art. They also describe how Popova and Stepanova, two women designers involved in constructivist work, began the process of making in the factory. “At the same time, their efforts failed in a lot of ways,” Hope said. “Sometimes your theories don’t map out onto real artmaking, and that’s maybe also okay, but still valuable to think about.”

Hope serves as co-leader of Orpheus Review, Swarthmore’s first and only music-focused arts publication. Though Hope took piano lessons growing up, they no longer make music in any way. Yet they still see music as being “the best thing ever” — possibly because they cannot make it. “I’m so happy that I don’t make music because I think I have a shred of mystery left for me in how the sausage is made,” they said. “I really appreciate writing and reading. I read a lot. But I think there is something incredible about not using words and kind of transgressing language.” They added, “I think visual art is just as capable of that as music, and that is really striking to me.”

Orpheus Review allows Hope to think, talk, and write about music in a way they value. “There was a time when I thought it would be so awesome to be a music journalist,” they said. “But I really think that I wanted to be a music journalist because I wanted to listen to music all day and not necessarily because I wanted to write about music.” Nonetheless, they say Orpheus is fun, and “we have a good crew.” The group’s articles can be found online. Recently, the staff has been conducting a series of interviews with professors about their taste in music. Orpheus also hosts events, including an end-of-year celebration next week, Dec. 10, near the Office of Student Engagement in Sharples Commons. 

Hope credits many peers, friends, and instructors at Swarthmore for helping them along the way. “I feel like I’m surrounded by a lot of people who were on a similar path to me and chose different options in really great ways,” they said. They especially credit Joyner: “She knows when I’m bullshitting her. Which I sometimes need, because I need to be held accountable, as everyone does. She knows what’s up.”

They also appreciate Associate Professor Brian Goldstein, their thesis advisor in art history; Jay Johnson, who manages the engineering machine shop; and Josh Jordan, who runs the Maker Space and Wood Shop. “Those are kind of my squad of people,” they said. “They’re all really invested in making whatever crazy thing you want come true.”

Though their friends don’t take many visual art classes, Hope credits them for many ideas. They said, “I love my friends, they’re great. They say things that are totally random but spark something, you never know when inspiration is going to hit you. It’s beautiful.”Someday, Hope would like to get an MFA and pursue art. “I would also love to sit in a little hidey hole and write a dissertation and become a professor,” they said. They don’t necessarily have one idea of what the future holds, and that’s okay by them.