Lucy R. Lippard is a writer and activist, author of 20 books on contemporary art and cultural criticism, including one novel. She has done performances, comics, street theatre, and has curated some 50 exhibitions in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. For thirty years she has worked with artists’ groups such as the Artworkers’ Coalition, Ad Hoc Women Artists’, Artists Meeting for Cultural Change, The Alliance for Cultural Democracy (co-editor of “How to 93” in the Campaign for a Post-Columbian World), and WAC (Women’s Action Coalition). She was a co-founder of Printed Matter, The Heresies Collective and Journal, PADD (Political Art Documentation/ Distribution) and its journal Upfront, and Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America. She continues to lecture frequently at museums and universities. At home, she has served as a member of the Santa Fe County Open Land and Trails Planning and Advisory Committee, edits her community newsletter, El Puente de Galisteo, and is on the Santa Fe Railywrd Park Design Committee with the Trust for Public Land.
Her books (1966 to the present) are: Pop Art, The Graphic Work of Philip Evergood, Dadas on Art (ed), Surrealists on Art (ed), Changing: Essays in Art Criticism, Tony Smith, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object…, From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art, Eva Hesse, I See/ You Mean (novel), Cracking (artist’s book, with Charles Simonds(, Ad Reinhardt, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory, Get the Message? A decade of Art for Social Change, A deifferent War: Vietnam in Art, Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America, Partial Recall: Photographs of Native North Americans, The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Essays on Feminist Art, and The Lure of the Loval: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, FLorence Pierce: In Touch with Light and On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art and Place.
She has co-authored books on The School of Paris (with A. Barr and J. Thrall Soby). Kathe Kollwitz, Mary Kelly, Cecilia Vicuna, and Marilyn Bridges, among others; she wrote the foreword to Marks in Place: Contempoarary Responses to Rock Art, and the 1999 edition of Dean MacCannell’s The Tourist, among others. She is frequently anthologized and writes prolifically for magazines and exhibition caalogues. (For partial bibliography, see From the Sniper’s nest: Art that has lived with Lucy R. Lippard, 1995.) She has written regular colums on art and politics for the Village Voice, In These Times, and Z Magazine, and is a contributing editor of Art in America.
Lippard graduated from Smith College (BA 1958) and the New York University Institute of Fine Arts (MA in art history 1962), has received honorary doctorates in fine arts from the Art Institute of Chicago, Moore College of Art, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Maine College of Art, and the Massachusetts College Art Association, two National Endowment for the Arts grants in criticism, the Claude Fuess Award for Public Service from Phillips Andover Academy, a curating award from the Penny McCall Foundation, a citation from New York City Mayor David Dinkins, the Frederick Douglass Award from the North Star Foundation, the Smith COllege Medal, the ArtTable Award for Distinguished Service to the Visual Arts, and the Athena award (RSID) for excellence in art criticism. In 2002 she shared with co-authors a Southwast Book Award for Nuevo Mexico Profundo. Lippard has been included in Who’s Who in America for over a decade. She is a Research Associate at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture/ Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe, New Meixico, and receive a Lannan Foundation Completion Grant for a book on the Galisteo Basin, where she lives.
Lippard has been a visiting professor at the School for Visual Arts, NYC, Williams College, The University of Queensland, Australia, and University of Colorado, Boulder. She serves or has served on the boards of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Printed Matter, Franklin Furnace, REPOhistory, Time an Space Limited, SoHo 20, Earth Works Institute, and the Center for America Places, among others.
- Courtesy of Lucy Lippard
- Su Friedrich and Lucy Lippard by Mary Beth Edelson
- Courtesy of Lucy Lippard
