ABOUT THE INSTALLATION
Hive Mind, a large-scale outdoor sculpture fabricated in bronze and glass, captures the dynamics of a highly organized social system, its circular form and rhythm evoking the perpetual cycles of production. The sculpture embodies the process of gathering, binding and conserving knowledge. Objects rise from and sink into the sculpture, hinting at how memory surfaces and recedes. Not everything is visible at all times to every viewer—an analogy for the elusive nature of memory.
Hive Mind celebrates Iowa State University’s legacy- its contributions and reverberations across critical disciplines such as science, technology and agriculture. Its genesis is its visual reference to the round hay bale, an innovation developed in the 1960’s by ISU professor Wesley Buchele. Like so many other breakthroughs, this one invention catalyzed its respective industry and revolutionized the act of harvesting. Positioned at the heart of campus, where all pathways converge, Hive Mind contains embedded clear glass objects that represent ISU’s past, present, and future.
A solo exhibition entitled Middle of the Story will be on view in the Christian Petersen Art Museum at Iowa State University beginning August 25, 2025.
ABOUT BETH LIPMAN
American, b. 1971, New York, NY
lives and works in Sheboygan Falls, WI
Beth Lipman is an American artist whose sculptural practice generates from the Still Life genre, symbolically representing the splendor and excess of the Anthropocene and the stratigraphic layer humanity will leave on earth. Assemblages of inanimate objects and domestic interiors, inspired by private spaces and public collections, propose portraits of individuals, institutions, and societies.
Temporality and mortality-primary concerns linked to the Still Life tradition are heightened through materiality. Works in glass, wood, metal, photography, and video disrupt the mechanisms of fixed, grand narratives in order to emphasize evanescence at the heart of ‘vanitas’. Sculptural processes become analogies for life cycles, pointing to systems both natural and human that must continually adapt in order to survive.
The works are a meditation on our relationship to Deep Time, a monumental time scale based on geologic events that minimizes human lives. Each installation is a reimagining of history, created by placing cycles often separated by millennia in proximity, from the ancient botanical to the cultural. The incorporation of prehistoric flora alludes to the impermanence of the present and the persistence of life. The ephemera of the Anthropocene become a symbol of fragility as the human species is placed on a continuum where time eradicates hierarchy.
Lipman has received numerous awards including a USA Berman Bloch Fellowship, Pollock Krasner Grant, Virginia Groot Foundation Grant, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant. She recently completed One Portrait of One Man, a sculptural response to Marsden Hartley for the Weisman Art Museum (MN). Lipman has exhibited her work internationally at such institutions as the Ringling Museum of Art (FL), ICA/MECA (ME), RISD Museum (RI), Milwaukee Art Museum (WI), Gustavsbergs Konsthall (Sweden) and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (DC). Her work has been acquired by numerous museums including the North Carolina Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art (NY), Smithsonian American Art Museum (DC), and the Corning Museum of Glass (NY).