BETH LIPMAN

BETH LIPMAN

BETHLIPMAN.COM

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BIO

ABOUT

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).

MORE ON BETH LIPMAN

Beth Lipman explores aspects of material culture through still lives, site-specific installations, and photographs. Working primarily with glass, she creates portraits individuals and our society through inanimate objects that are often broken, “flawed,” or “perfect”.  Mortality, consumerism, materiality, and temporality, have been critical issues since the inception of the still life tradition in the 17th century, and continue to be relevant her in contemporary work.

— Beth Lipman

ON MILES’ LAW

Miles’ Law is a large-scale work designed to investigate Marjorie Merriweather Post’s use of diplomacy to bridge political, cultural, and societal divides. The sculpture is a rumination on Rufus Miles’s phrase, ‘Where you stand depends on where you sit,’ and explores how one’s view of a situation is shaped by one’s relationship to it. Post deftly employed domestic rituals that literally “brought people to the table” such as dinner parties and other social functions to subtly persuade disparate individuals to empathize with another point of view.

Visually split down the center, half of the work will be composed of clear glass and the other half, black glass, with each composition mirroring the other. The duality will be disrupted by biomorphic forms that will protrude and grow through the composition, mimicking natural growth and entropic forces. This liberation illustrates how we are all susceptible to external forces and are subject to cycles of change. The still life tableau capitalizes on the genre’s capacity to illuminate the ways that one understands the world through visual metaphors.

Miles’ Law reflects on the current polarization that seems extraordinary, yet is an inherent aspect of the human condition. The twinning effect of the sculpture embodies the duality at the core of every individual. The marriage of transparent and opaque glass illustrates continuity with difference, embracing the inevitable variation of the hand made.

— Beth Lipman, 2023

Beth Lipman, “Distill #7” 2016, cast iron with rust patina, chrome, 8 x 12 x 5”.

ON DISTILL #7

Distill #7 combines ancient plant species such as conifer, lichen, and ferns with miniature furniture in a small vignette. The original is created in a cardboard shipping box and then cast in molten iron. Forcing the relationship between prehistoric and current geological eras, the casting process at once creates a replica and destroys the landscape, translating diorama into a fossilized depiction of the Anthropocene era. Distill #7 features symbolic objects of the sabbath, a shadow of domesticity with a bottle and clock.

— Beth Lipman

SELECT PAST EXHIBITIONS

BETH LIPMAN: ALL IN TIME | Wichita Art Museum (Solo Exhibition)
Wichita Art Museum | Wichita, KS
June 24 – September 25, 2022
VIEW THE EXHIBITION

TENACITY | Chatauqua Visual Arts (Group Exhibition)
Chatauqua Visual Arts | Chatauqua, NY
July 4 – August 24, 2021
VIEW THE EXHIBITION

BETH LIPMAN: COLLECTIVE ELEGY | Museum of Arts and Design (Solo Exhibition)
Museum of Arts and Design | New York, NY
September 24, 2020 – November 7, 2021
VIEW THE EXHIBITION

CRAFTING AMERICA | Crystal Bridges
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art | Bentonville, AR
Febraury 6 – May 31, 2021
VIEW THE EXHIBITION

HOUSE ALBUM (Site Responsive Object Study/Installation)

WILD MADDER at the Art Preserve of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (Architectural Commission)
John Michael Kohler Arts Center | Sheboygan, WI

• Back to Top

• MELTING POINT
• DERIVED FROM THE DECORATIVE: Works by Faig Ahmed, Beth Lipman and Bouke de Vries at Cheekwood Estate and Gardens
• CANARY SYNDROME
• REVIVE, REMIX, RESPOND

Beth Lipman: Craft In America Messages Episode

Glass artist Beth Lipman segment including UrbanGlass and John Michael Kohler Arts Center.

MESSAGES episode PBS premiered: May 24, 2011

MAD Moments: Special Edition with Artist Beth Lipman

For more than twenty years, artist Beth Lipman has transformed glass, metal, clay, video, and photographs into powerful statements addressing mortality, temporality, identity, and excess. Her ongoing project, House Album is a highlight of Beth Lipman: Collective Elegy, (September 24, 2021–January 2, 2022), the Museum’s survey of the artist’s last decade of work. Covering an entire wall, House Album comprises a multitude of flat glass panels, between which are sandwiched photographs of furniture and objects that memorialize important events or notable figures from American history. Recalling a Victorian scrapbook, the installation is an allegory of our collective home. A stunning yet polarized house struggling to make sense of its own history and identity. This film gives insight into Beth Lipman’s process as well as the deep routed ideas and beliefs that influence her work. Filmmaker Atesh Atici, with funding provided by the Alturas Foundation.

https://madmuseum.org