“America 250: Focus with Artist Beth Lipman" at the Figge Art Museum -- July 30.
Thursday, July 30, 6 p.m.
Figge Art Museum, 225 West Second Street, Davenport IA
In celebration of America’s 250th birthday, Davenport's Figge Art Museum has been hosting American Art talks throughout the month of July, and on Thursday the 30th, guests are invited to enjoy Focus with Artist Beth Lipman, held in conjunction with the A Golden Age for Whom? exhibition in the Figge's Mary Waterman Gildehaus Community Gallery. 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.
As stated at BethLipman.com, the artist "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), Kemper Museum for Contemporary Art (MO), Smithsonian American Art Museum (DC), Jewish Museum (NY), Norton Museum of Art, (FL), and the Corning Museum of Glass (NY). ReGift, a site specific installation investigating the life of Florence Scott Libbey, is on view at the Toledo Museum of Art.
"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 has been an Artist in Residence at the Alturas Foundation, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center’s Arts/Industry Program, and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. Recent works include Living History, a large scale site-specific commission for the Wichita Art Museum (KS) that investigates the nature of time and place and Belonging(s), a sculptural response to the life of Abigail Levy Franks for the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (AR)."
Also as mentioned in Lipman's Artist Statement: "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 millenia 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 becomes a symbol of fragility as the human species is placed on a continuum where time eradicates hierarchy."
America 250: Focus with Artist Beth Lipman will be presented in the John Deere Auditorium on July 30, admission to the 6 p.m. program is free, and the A Golden Age for Whom? exhibit itself will be on display through September 20. For more information, call (563)326-7894 and visit FiggeArtMuseum.org.
