Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Sculpture, textile, carving
Website: loloro.com
Laurel Roth Hope was born in 1973 in Concord, California, and lives and works in San Francisco’s Mission District with her husband and collaborator Andy Diaz Hope. She is a self-taught artist who worked as a park ranger and in natural resource conservation before becoming a full-time artist — professional experiences that have directly and lastingly shaped her practice. She has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco since around 2008. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Art and Design in New York, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Mint Museum, 21c Museum Hotels, the Zabludowicz Collection, the Progressive Collection, and the Ripley’s Museum of Hollywood, among others. Her awards and residencies include a 2025 Recology Artist in Residence, a 2020 Space Program SF Resident Artist, a 2017 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (shadowing scientists at the National Zoological Park and Museum of Natural History), and a 2016 Kohler Arts and Industry Residency in Wisconsin. She was included in the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian’s 40 Under 40: Craft Futures exhibition in 2012. Her Biodiversity Reclamation Suits were featured in National Geographic magazine in January 2018.
Roth Hope works in sculpture, carving, crocheting, weaving, and assemblage to examine the consequences of human manipulation of and intervention into the natural world. Her best-known works are her Biodiversity Reclamation Suits — intricately crocheted costumes for urban pigeons designed to mimic the feathers and coloration of extinct bird species, including the dodo and the Seychelles parakeet. Each suit requires months of work, and the resulting objects are absurd, melancholy, and genuinely beautiful — proposing the pigeon, the paradigmatic urban “pest,” as a kind of living monument to birds humanity has driven to extinction. Her more recent work, developed during her Smithsonian fellowship, extends into carved wooden skeletal figures whose internal systems are laid open and vulnerable — somewhere between summoning organs from consumer waste and slowly breaking apart. She works both independently and in sustained collaboration with Andy Diaz Hope.
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