Lucy Lippard, Stuff Instead of a Memoir

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Describing tchotchkes, photographs, and art in her unpretentious New Mexico home, the author informally narrates key events and relationships in her 86-year-long, highly creative life, starting with her family roots and her childhood in New York, Louisiana, Virginia, and Maine. Through anecdotal and often humorous memories, we follow the author through her youth, adulthood, relationships, and her thirty-five years in New York City, where she organized dozens of exhibitions, authored hundreds of articles, and co-founded Heresies: A Feminist Journal of Art and Politics, the artist's-book center Printed Matter, and activist artists group PAD/D Political Art Documentation/Distribution.) Lippard touches on the roles she played in Conceptual Art and the Feminist Art movement in the 1960s through the 1980s. Her accounts of more recent years focus on the art, landscape, culture, and communities of the American Southwest, where she moved in the early 1990s. This "anti-memoir" also mentions Lippard's twenty-five books, but few of her many honors.

About the Author

Lucy R. Lippard is a writer, feminist, and activist, author of 23 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, WEB (West East Bag), Artists Meeting for Cultural Change, The Alliance for Cultural Democracy, and WAC (Women’s Action Coalition). She was a co-founder of Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America. 

Lippard has been a visiting professor at the School of Visual Arts, NYC, Williams College, The University of Queensland, Australia, and University of Colorado, Boulder. She has served on the boards of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Printed Matter, Franklin Furnace, REPOhistory, Time and Space Limited, SoHo 20, Earth Works Institute, AXLE, the Center for American Places, and the Center for Art & Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, among others. 

Her books include Changing: Essays in Art Criticism, 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, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory, Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change, A Different 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 Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art and Place, Down Country: The Tano of the Galisteo Basin 1250-1782, and Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West, among many others. She writes prolifically for magazines and exhibition catalogues. She has written regular columns on art and politics for the Village Voice, In These Times, and Z Magazine, and is a contributing editor of Art in America.