Image: Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art WSU, Pullman
Jim Hodges’s monumental bronze sculpture ‘Unearthed (a work in progress)’ will be presented at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art WSU in Pullman, Washington, from August 25 through December 12, 2026. The exhibition will mark only the second residency for the work, following its first presentation at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco in 2019.
Listed by the museum as ‘Unearthed, 2015 to present,’ the sculpture takes the form of an uprooted tree stump cast in bronze. Its suspended, truncated form evokes both the scale and dignity of a living tree and the consequences of its removal. The museum describes the work as a meditation on fragility, ephemerality and the sacredness of life, while connecting it to broader questions about relationships between environments and the communities that inhabit them.
The sculpture’s stillness is central to its presentation. Although the visible object is a severed trunk, the absent branches suggest a tree that once extended toward the sun and carried life in its foliage and bark. In the museum’s account, that tension allows the work to address environmental loss without limiting its meaning to devastation, instead opening what it calls “generative thought” about renewal and regeneration.
The Pullman presentation is described as the work’s second “residency,” placing it within the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art’s academic and regional setting at Washington State University. The museum is located in the Crimson Cube on the WSU Pullman campus, at 1535 NE Wilson Road. During the exhibition period, it is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; it is closed on Sundays, Mondays, holidays and university breaks.
Hodges has made work since the late 1980s around themes including fragility, temporality, love and death. His practice encompasses found objects and traditional materials such as graphite, ink, gold leaf and mirrored elements. The museum also identifies a personal connection to the region: Hodges spent his formative years in Spokane, Washington, where he explored the woods around his childhood home and developed an early responsiveness to nature and the visual world.
Now internationally renowned, Hodges was the subject of the touring retrospective ‘Give More Than You Take’ from 2013 to 2015. The exhibition began at the Dallas Museum of Art and traveled to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. His work is held in collections including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Walker Art Center and the Musée National, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Hodges lives and works between New York City and Milan, Italy.
Organized by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art WSU, the exhibition is funded by the Walla Walla Foundry, Kim and Jon Shirley, Les and Carolyn Stephens, Sharon and Craig Campbell, Greg and Ronna Bell, the Samuel H. and Patricia W. Smith Endowment and friends of the museum. Following its Pullman presentation, the museum’s description states that the work’s roots will eventually be reunited with the ground through burial, leaving the severed trunk visible in a new role within nature.
