Alice Hope’s ‘True Value’ Installation Engages Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic Legacy at LongHouse Reserve

Alice Hope constructed “True Value” as a direct response to LongHouse Reserve’s iconic Buckminster Fuller-inspired geodesic dome. The installation features geodesic spheres built from True Value yardsticks, paying homage to Fuller’s geometry while exploring themes of measurement and value embedded in both material and form.

The utilitarian yardstick, a common measuring tool, is repurposed as the structural element of the spheres’ triangulated surfaces. Branded “True Value,” the yardsticks evoke ideas of standardization and quantification, as well as the distinctly American intersections of commerce, labor, advertising, and the illusion of objective worth. By transforming the measuring tools into the structure itself, Hope inverts their purpose: The tools that once measured now become what is measured.

Red dots appear across the yardsticks’ surfaces. In the art world, red dots signify a sale or assigned value. In other contexts, they imply targeting, surveillance, urgency, or erasure. Here, the dots function as both pattern and code, reflecting tensions between commodification and perception, utility and symbolism.

Unlike Fuller’s open geodesic dome, Hope’s spheres are complete and enclosed, suggesting containment and recursion. The concentric installation invites viewers to walk around and interpret geometry made not only of lines and angles but also culturally loaded signs — yardsticks and red dots — that measure not only space but also unconscious systems and beliefs about value.

The installation will be on view at LongHouse through the end of October 2025.

Hope is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York City and the East End. Named New York’s “Woman To Watch” in 2018 by the National Museum of Women in the Arts, she is known for public and private commissioned installations that incorporate materials with embedded cultural significance, such as can tabs, price tags, blue tape, magnets, and fish netting.

Her interest in seine netting began after a 2019 visit to Maputo, Mozambique, where she observed fishermen using seine nets near the U.S. Embassy. This inspired “Murmuration 1,” a large wall sculpture made of knotted Corona can tabs in monofilament seine netting, permanently installed at the embassy in 2021. The follow-up, “Murmuration 2,” featuring Coke can tabs knotted into multifilament seine netting, was shown in 2022 at The Church in Sag Harbor.

Hope holds an MFA from Yale University and has exhibited widely in New York and on Long Island. Her site-specific projects include “Under the Radar” at Camp Hero State Park in Montauk (2012), installations at WNYC Greene Space (2013), Queens Museum (2015), and the Armory Show (2013). She was artist in residence at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design in 2014-2015. In 2018, Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton featured a solo exhibition of her work, and in 2022 the museum presented her installations at the Amagansett Life Saving Station. She recently completed public commissions in Washington, D.C., and Brooklyn, using blue tape.

LongHouse Reserve is located at 133 Hands Creek Road, East Hampton. For more information, visit longhouse.org.