The HOOPS Project

The HOOPS Project began in 2019 with a simple question: What do hoop earrings mean to you?

What began as an intimate portrait session with Milwaukee-based art collective LUNA quickly revealed something much larger. I invited each artist to wear their hoops and share the stories, memories, and feelings connected to them. As I listened, I began to understand that hoop earrings are never simply an accessory. They are an act of adornment, identity, inheritance, resistance, and reclamation.

For many of us, hoops carry the weight of generations. They are connected to our mothers, grandmothers, cultures, neighborhoods, and childhoods. They can mark a rite of passage, a sense of belonging, an expression of beauty, or an unapologetic declaration of self. To put on a pair of hoops can be an ordinary ritual or a deeply intentional act of remembering who we are and where we come from.

Through portraiture and storytelling, The HOOPS Project documents these intimate relationships with an object that has traveled across cultures, borders, and generations. The project features more than 100 individuals from Milwaukee, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and beyond, creating an evolving archive of voices from Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, and other communities of the global majority.

The people represented here are teachers, artists, doulas, healers, healthcare workers, musicians, poets, advocates, mothers, DJs, hairstylists, dancers, service workers, executives, and creators. Their stories are as varied as they are. Some are joyful. Some are tender. Some are rooted in struggle, survival, or resistance. Together, they create a collective portrait of people who have found meaning in the simple, powerful act of adorning themselves.

The HOOPS Project is an archive, but it is also an offering.

It is an attempt to preserve stories that are often passed down orally, held within families, carried through communities, or left undocumented. It asks us to consider what we inherit, what we reclaim, and what we choose to carry forward.

Since its beginning as a portrait project, The HOOPS Project has expanded into a stage play and continues to evolve through the stories of the people who contribute to it. This exhibition marks another chapter in that evolution and moves the work toward its next form: the first HOOPS coffee table book.

At its heart, this project is about connection. It is about seeing ourselves reflected in one another. It is about the stories we carry in our bodies and the objects we use to tell them.

The hoops are the thread. The stories are the medicine.

Stills from the HOOPS play written by Eliana Pipes from the HOOPS Project. Thank you to the amazing actors: Celia Mandela Rivera as Aye, Paulina Lule as Bey, Ashley Oviedo as Cee. Photos by Michael Brosilow.