Lucy Lippard: Art Critic, Feminist, Environmental Activist.

Lucy Lippard 

•born 1937 in New York City

•internationally known writer, activist and curator.

•was among the first writers to recognize the de-materialization at work in conceptual art.

•early champion of feminist art.

•author of 21 books on contemporary art.

•received numerous awards and accolades from literary critics and art associations.

CONCEPTUAL ART

Lucy Lippard, ed. (1997), Six Years: the dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972. Dematerialisation in this connection aims to deemphasise the material aspects of art, and especially of art as object, and its prevailing orthodoxies of 'uniqueness, permanence, and decorative attractiveness' into an 'anti-form' or 'process art'.

In1966, she organized an exhibition entitled “Eccentric Abstraction” at the Fischbach Gallery in New York City. “Eccentric Abstraction” set the standard for what would later be regarded as postminimalism, process, or antiform art.  

The Eccentric Abstraction show included Louise Bourgeois, Alice Adams,  Bruce Nauman, Eva Hesse, Frank Viner, Donald Potts, & Gary Kuehn, most of whom were showing in New York for the first time.

FEMINIST ART

 In the 1970s, when she was "the only art critic championing women's art," she called for a "separate feminist aesthetic consciousness."  A strident feminist , she brought the aesthetic, economic, material, and practical concerns of women artists into the art-historical dialogue.

 That same year Lippard, a dedicated activist, helped found the Art Workers’ Coalition, a group seeking vast changes to the art world, including a restructuring of the policies of the Museum of Modern Art in favour of artists’ having a voice in the exhibition of their work and a general improvement in artists’ living conditions. 
She wrote with particular conviction about artists Eva Hesse and Judy Chicago.


 Lippard was a founding member of the feminist journal Heresies (1977). Most of her books on art reflect her activist politics. Some of major works are:-

"Get the Message: A Decade of Art for Social Change" explores the relationships between political art, feminism, and leftist politics.

 "Mixed Blessing: New Art in Multi-cultural America" (1990) asks questions about the state of diversity in art.

“ From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art” (1976) is a semiautobiographical account of the early days of the feminist art movement.

“ Changing: Essays in Art Criticism” (1971), Lippard advocated women’s art, helping to bring this movement from the margin of the art world to the centre of social concern.

 ENVIRONMENTAL ART
Several books reflect her take on art in relation to the environment: 

“ The Lure of the Local” (1997),  examines how people create their identities from their environments, and defines the local as "the intersections of nature, culture, history, and ideology that form the ground on which we stand."

She consistently makes unexpected connections between contemporary art and its political, social, and cultural contexts. 

“On the Beaten Track”(2000). explores the act of being a tourist in one's own home, the role of advertising and photography in defining place, antique shops as populist museums, and the commodification of indigenous cultures. She surveys how artists are responding to the environmental, cultural, and political issues surrounding contemporary tourism.  

Her most recent curatorial venture was Weather Report: Art and Climate Change
 (Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007).
 Artists exhibiting included Joyce Cutler Shaw.

 “I have always said that art cannot change the world…alone. But working with other disciplines and audiences, and given the chance to be seriously considered outside the rather narrow world of art, artists can contribute a certain visual jolt to reigning clichés. They are freer to imagine outcomes than scholars and at best can make the realities of climate change more vivid and immediate than any other medium in this visually oriented society.” Lippard 2007.


Courtesy of : Maggie and Wendy.