A Diary of Flowers - Above the Clouds, 1995
- Medium
- Ink on 100 napkins with pins
- Dimensions
- 56 x 100 in. (142.2 x 254 cm)
- Accession Number
- 96.3
- Credit
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Purchase with funds provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. and Councilman Joel Wachs
This installation consists of one hundred paper napkins featuring drawings of flowers made with a ballpoint pen. Extremely delicate and gauzy, disposable paper napkins became a primary material for Jim Hodges as a young artist, when he would pick up a coffee from his local deli on the way to work and be handed a surplus of napkins. The ephemeral nature of the utilitarian material, designed to be soiled and discarded, as well as the sentimental significance of the flower as a token of affection or precarious beauty, evoke feelings of fragility, love, tenderness, and loss. Made at the height of the AIDS epidemic, which took the lives of many of Hodges’s friends and community members, A Diary of Flowers - Above the Clouds underscores the impermanence and fragility of life.