Self Portrait by Hope Horn (1920–2001), oil on canvas, Museum purchase, EM299

Hope Horn (1920-2001), a Scranton, PA native, was a painter, sculptor, and educator who spent her life creating and teaching art. Aside from a few years in the 1970s that she spent training and working in Florence, Italy, she dedicated her life to the regional art community of Northeastern Pennsylvania, including spending many decades as an art instructor at the Everhart Museum.

Hope Horn’s artworks are known for being representational yet abstract at the same time, as she painting many ordinary objects, like an orange, in abstract scenes by painting them in isolation. Horn wrote of her own pieces, “I am fascinated with the dynamics of visual thought—the energies contained in shape and form and color.”