Artist’s Statement:
For more than three decades, Hope Alcorn has worked in abstraction, exploring color, pattern, movement, and material. She paints on canvas and industrial wool felt, layers color through stencils and transfers, and cuts painted canvases into strips that she weaves together. Across these works, color and pattern establish order, test its limits, and keep the eye moving.
Alcorn calls what she creates “joyful noise.” Noise suggests interference, simultaneity, and even disorder. She creates a visual equivalent through accumulations of color, repeated marks, grids, and interlocking forms. Contrasting colors compete for attention, while shifting patterns and dense surfaces create a sense of vibration and rhythm. Although the paintings make no actual sound, they are anything but quiet.
Her woven paintings extend this interplay of pattern and disruption. She begins with two separately painted canvases, cuts them into strips, and progressively weaves them together. Cutting interrupts the original compositions; weaving creates new relationships among their fragments. Traces of two paintings remain, transformed into a third.
Alcorn’s work also engages a long history of abstraction and textile traditions, where repetition, structure, and color create complex visual languages. Ultimately, her paintings invite viewers to experience joy through movement, abundance, attention, and surprise—the unexpected rhythm of color and pattern continually becoming something new.
What, then, might joy look like? Alcorn leaves that question open. An unexpected color, a pattern changing course, the rhythm of one mark following another, two paintings woven into a new whole: each offers a different encounter. Across these works, joy emerges through movement, attention, abundance, and surprise.
Perhaps that is Alcorn’s joyful noise: the possibility of encountering joy.
Hope Gelfand Alcorn is a native Pennsylvanian, graduated from Pennsylvania State University with a B.S. in social welfare; has an associate degree in Nursing from Tompkins-Cortland Community College in Dryden, NY; and has a Masters (MPH) and a Doctorate (Dr. PH) in Public Health from the University of Pittsburgh. She currently resides in Pittsburgh. Hope is a medical writer for a global clinical research organization.
Hope has exhibited extensively in regional, national, and international venues, including the Jewish Museum Gallery in Pittsburgh, the Fowler-Kellogg Art Center at Chautauqua Institution, the Erie Art Museum, Harlan Gallery at Seton Hill University, the Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts, and the Wichita Center for the Arts. Her work has also been exhibited in Australia and Canada.
Alcorn’s work has been included in numerous juried and group exhibitions, including exhibitions presented by the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh, the Fiberarts Guild of Pittsburgh, and the Textile Art Alliance of the Cleveland Museum of Art. In 2026, the Jewish Museum Gallery presented a 30-year retrospective of her work.
Her work has been featured in publications including 500 Felt Objects, 1000 Artisan Textiles, Surface Design, and The Crafts Report, which featured her work on its cover. Her work is held in private and public collections, including the AC Hotel and U.S. Filter in the Airside Business Park in Pittsburgh.
Alcorn’s longstanding engagement with abstraction and fiber reflects an ongoing exploration of how color, pattern, and material can transform perception.
All images copyrighted by Hope Gelfand Alcorn. Artwork on this site may not be copied or reproduced in any form without permission from the artist. Last updated, September 2026