Robert Leroy Hodge
Frequency
West Gallery
September 12 - October 31, 2026
Opening Reception:
Saturday, September 12, 6pm-9pm
ARTIST STATEMENT
This body of work began, in many ways, in 2017, with a piece I fell completely in love with called Lord's Prayer, created during my residency at Artpace in San Antonio. Built from record sleeves, acrylic, oil stick, and a commissioned red neon light that cut through the center of the canvas, it taught me something about how material itself can carry meaning, how a found object, a mark, and a line of light could be layered into something that felt whole. I had started as a traditional painter and draftsman, and moved into collage because I wanted to push the envelope, I loved the idea of taking existing images, with all their inherited associations, and turning them completely on their heads. Even as I felt ready for a new direction, I knew I still had more to say through collage. Frequency is that extension, a new synthesis of everything I have accumulated over the years, grounded in material, composition, design, and color, in pursuit of paintings that are less about image than presence, works that can exist in any space and across time.
It was in that pursuit that I began researching the frequency 432 Hz, and found myself returning to a simple idea, that sound is the oldest architecture, before language, before image, there was vibration, the pulse that organized matter into pattern, and pattern into meaning. Frequency begins from this premise, that a single number, 432 Hz, might be translated not through the ear but through the eye, the hand, and the body standing before a canvas.
For nearly two centuries, 432 Hz has occupied a contested but persistent place in the history of tuning. Long associated by its advocates with the acoustics of the natural world, with resonance patterns said to echo in water, in cellular structure, in the proportions of ancient instruments and architecture, it stands in quiet opposition to the standardized 440 Hz adopted by the music industry in the twentieth century. Whether or not one accepts the more mystical claims made on its behalf, the frequency has become, culturally, a symbol, a stand in for a return to coherence, calm, and the natural order of things. It is this symbolic and sensory inheritance, as much as any acoustic property, that Frequency takes as its material.
BIOGRAPHY
Robert Hodge is a multidisciplinary artist and curator based in Houston, Texas. His work celebrates resilience and reclamation through poignant commemorations of African American cultural icons, deeply rooted in the ongoing continuum of African American history and expression. Hodge’s collage-based practice skillfully weaves together urban materials, found objects, lyrics, and imagery that speak to the African American experience. Through this synthesis, he transforms fragments of everyday life into powerful vessels of memory and meaning. His process, cutting, sewing, scorching, and painting—dissolves the boundaries between reclaimed materials and inherited traditions, offering new ways of seeing through the layered histories of Black life.
Hodge recently curated the fourth iteration of Collect It For The Culture, titled Collect It Forever, presented at StudioEIGHT08 and on view through March. Hodge currently has an exhibition opening at the Houston Museum of African American Culture on Juneteenth 2026. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions such as the SCHIRN in Frankfurt, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and the Carnegie Museum of Art. Currently, his artwork is featured in The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century at the Cincinnati Museum of Art.
