Lucy R. Lippard

Lucy R. Lippard (1937, New York City) is an art historian, curator, writer and activist. As a critic, Lippard is best known for her study of conceptual art in Six Years: the Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 and for her writing on feminist art and politically engaged art. Lippard has curated over 50 exhibitions and currently resides in Galisteo, New Mexico.

Lippard was an active member of the Art Workers Coalition, an open coalition of artists and art workers founded in 1969 to pressure cultural institutions to take a stand on political issues of the day, including the Vietnam war. She was one of the founders of Printed Matter established in 1976 by Sol Lewitt and others to distribute artists' books. Lippard has written on artists' publications, particularly in connection to conceptual art's strategies of "dematerialization". She was an early proponent of the concept of the artist's book as a "democratic multiple" and famously called for artists' books to appear in "supermarkets, drugstores, and airports" rather than artistic venues.

In 1979, Lippard founded the Political Art Documentation/Distribution archive, which was donated to the MoMA Library in 1989; the PAD/D collection features materials related to ACT UP, Guerrilla Girls, Keith Haring, Gregory Sholette, Yoko Ono and John Lennon, among others.

Publications

Books

• with Lawrence Alloway, Nancy Marmer and Nicolas Calas, Pop Art, intro. Lucy R. Lippard, New York: Praeger, 1966, 216 pp.
  • Pop art, trans. Wim Gijsen, The Hague: Gaade, 1966, 216 pp. (Dutch)
  • Pop art, trans. Roberto Sanesi, Milan: Gabriele Mazzotta, 1967, 256 pp. (Italian)
  • Pop Art, Belgrade: Jugoslavija, 1967. Review: Rus (ZU). (Serbo-Croatian)
  • Poppu āto [ポップ・アート], trans. Atsushi Miyakawa, Tokyo: Kinokuniya Shoten, 1967, 216 pp. (Japanese)
  • Pop art, trans. Wolfgang Längsfeld and Margarete Längsfeld, Munich: Droemer Knaur, 1968, 236 pp. (German)
  • Le pop art, Paris: Hazan, 1969, 216 pp. (French)
  • Pop art, trans. Giōrgos Tassopoulos, Athens: Ekdoseis Hypodomē, 1984, 248 pp. (Greek)
  • El pop art, trans. Nicolas Calas, Barcelona: Destino, 1993, 216 pp. (Spanish)
• Surrealists on Art, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970.
• Changing: Essays in Art Criticism, New York: Dutton, 1971.
• Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972; A Cross-Reference Book of Information on Some Esthetic Boundaries, New York: Praeger, 1973, xxii+272 pp.
  • Seis años, trans. Luz Rodríguez Olivares, 2004. (Spanish)
• Eva Hesse, New York: New York University Press, 1976.
• From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women's Art, New York: Dutton, 1976.
• Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory, New York: Pantheon Books, 1983.
• Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1984, 343 pp.
• Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America, New York: Pantheon Books, 1990, vii+278 pp; new ed., New York: The New Press, 2000.
• A Different War: Vietnam in Art, Bellingham, WA: Whatcom Museum of History and Art, 1990.
• The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Essays on Feminist Art, New York: The New Press, 1995, viii+342 pp.
• The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, New York: New Press, 1998. Part 1 of 5.
• On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art and Place, New York: New Press, 1999.
• Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West, The New Press, 2014. Excerpts.

Editor

• co-editor, Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, New York: Heresies Collective, 1977-93.

Essays

• "Eccentric Abstraction", Art International 10:9 (Nov 1966); upd. in Lippard, Changing: Essays in Art Criticism, 1971, pp 98-111.
• "Change and Criticism: Consistency and Small Minds", Art International 9:9, New York, Nov 1967; repr. in Lippard, Changing: Essays in Art Criticism, 1971, pp 23-34.
• with John Chandler, "The Dematerialization of Art", Art International 12:2, New York, Feb 1968, pp 31-36; repr. in Lippard, Changing: Essays in Art Criticism, 1971, pp 255-276. Written in late 1967.
  • "La desmaterialización del arte", trans. Jaime Arrambide, in Sistemas, Acciones y Procesos, 1965-1975, ed. Rodrigo Alonso, PROA, 2011, pp 106-116. (Spanish)
• "The Artist's Book Goes Public", Art in America, Jan-Feb 1977; repr. in Lippard, Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change, E.P. Dutton, 1984, pp 48-52; repr. in Artists' Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, ed. Lyons, 1985, pp 45-48.
• "Conspicuous Consumption: New Artists' Books", in Artists' Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, ed. Lyons, 1985, pp 49-59.
• "Skärningspunkter / Intersections", trans. Tua Waern, in Flyktpunkter, Stockholm: Moderna museet, 1984, 11-29. (Swedish)/(English)
• "Andres Serrano: The Spirit and The Letter", Art in America, Apr 1990, 238-245.
• "On and Off the Map", in Lippard, The Lure of the Local, 1997, pp 75-82.
• "Time Capsule", in Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader, eds. Will Bradley and Charles Esche, London: Tate Publishing, 2007, pp 408-421.
• "Curating by Numbers", Tate Papers 12: "Landmark Exhibitions", London: Tate, Autumn 2009.

Literature

• Materializing Six Years: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art, eds. Catherine Morris and Vincent Bonin, MIT Press, and New York: Brooklyn Museum of Art, 2012.
  • Julia Bryan-Wilson, "Still Relevant: Lucy Lippard, Feminist Activism, and Art Institutions", pp 70-92.

Links

• Artforum interview, 2012. Video, 7 min.
• PAD/D Collection at MoMA
• PAD/D
• Wikipedia