In 1966, Lucy Lippard organized the exhibition Eccentric Abstraction at Fischbach Gallery in New York. With this exhibition, Lippard brought together a group of abstract artists which included
Alice Adams,
Louise Bourgeois,
Lindsey Decker,
Eva Hesse,
Gary Kuehn,
Bruce Nauman,
Keith Sonnier, and more. The exhibition focused on the ‘use of organic abstract form in sculpture evoking the gendered body through an emphasis on process and materials.’ Lippard referred to eccentric abstraction as a “non-sculptural style,” which was closer to abstract painting than to sculpture. Lucy Lippard was a member of the populist political artist group known as the
Art Workers Coalition, or AWC, which was founded in New York City in 1969. Her involvement in the AWC as well as a trip she took to Argentina—such trips bolstered the political motivations of many feminists of the time—influenced a change in the focus of her criticism, from formalist subjects to more feministic ones. Lucy Lippard is also believed to be a co-founder of
West-East Bag, an international women artist network which was founded in 1971, in the early beginnings of the feminist art movement in the United States. Their newsletter W.E.B. mentioned tactics used against museums to protest the lack of female representation in museum collections and exhibitions. The group was dissolved in 1973. In 1975, Lippard traveled to Australia and spoke to groups of women artists in
Melbourne and
Adelaide about the creation of archives of women artists' work on
photographic slides, known as slide registers, by West-East Bag, the idea being to counteract their lack of showings in
art galleries. Lippard was a major influence in the establishment of the
Women's Art Movement in Australia, and developed a friendship with leading proponent
Vivienne Binns, who later visited New York. In 1976, Lucy Lippard published a monographic work on the sculptor
Eva Hesse combining biography and criticism, formal analysis and psychological readings to tell the story of her life and career. The book was designed by Hesse’s friend and colleague,
Sol LeWitt. Each of her seventy sculptures and many of her drawings are reproduced and discussed within the book. Being a long-time friend of Hesse, Lippard treads a fine line between public and private life. She writes about the achievements and many struggles in Hesse’s life that had an impact on who she was as a person. Eva Hesse was born in 1936, in Germany, but because of her Jewish upbringing she and her family were forced to flee from the Nazi regime in 1938, arriving in New York in 1939. During their flight, Hesse’s father kept diaries of the journey for each of the children, a habit Hesse returned to later in her life. In these diaries she talked about the struggles in her life. Hesse is an American artist known for her innovative use of materials in her sculptures, such as fiberglass, latex and plastics. This innovative use of ‘soft’ materials has become an inspiration source for a younger generation of women artists. Lippard further writes that although Hesse died before
feminism affected the art world, she was well aware of the manner in which her experience as a woman altered her art and her career. In writing this important work on Eva Hesse, Lucy Lippard has tapped into her knowledge of and passion for feminism, particularly within the art world. Although the book is long out-of-print, this classic text remains both an insightful critical analysis and a tribute to an important female artist ‘whose genius has become increasingly apparent with the passage of time.’ A 2012 exhibition on her seminal book,
Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object at the Brooklyn Museum, titled
"Six Years": Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art", cites Lippard's scholarship as its point of entry into a discussion about conceptual art during its era of emergence, demonstrating her crucial role in the contemporary understanding of this period of art production and criticism. Co-founder of
Printed Matter, Inc (an art bookstore in New York City centered on
artist's books), the
Heresies Collective,
Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D),
Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America, and other artists' organizations, she has also curated over 50 exhibitions, made performances, comics,
guerrilla theater, and edited several independent publications, including
El Puente, a monthly community newsletter, from her home in
Galisteo, New Mexico, where she moved in the early 1990s. She has infused
aesthetics with politics, and disdained disinterestedness for ethical activism. She was interviewed for the film
!Women Art Revolution. In 2023, she published a pictorial autobiography,
Stuff: Instead of a Memoir. On this occasion,
The New York Review of Books described Lippard as "a canonical figure who held no truck with canons, who disdained art history only to become art history.” == Honors and awards ==