Among the most important art writers of the last fifty years, Lucy Lippard contributed to the discourse—and activism—around many of the major movements, from feminist and conceptual to eco, indigenous, and multicultural art. In Stuff: Instead of a Memoir (New Village Press, 2023) Lippard uses various personal items as prompts to recollections of a life lived in art—“object-induced memories,” she calls them.
To write this highly entertaining—and compelling—life review, the self-described “active, if whiny, octogenarian” sat in her father’s aged Lazy Boy or worked from a makeshift desk atop her dog’s crate bed in her one-room abode in Galisteo, New Mexico, her home since 1993. The tour features a wide range of mementos, from a geometric rug from Botswana picked up at a yard sale to her grandson Calvin’s Christmas present picture of a dancing figure wearing a sinking Titanic T-shirt.
Photos of kin prompt portraits of some fascinating family figures. A favorite: Lippard’s maternal great-grandfather, Reverend Roselle Cross, a mineralogist and a missionary/circuit rider in the mountains of Colorado. At one point in his travels he spotted “the skeleton of a horse standing up, as though he had forgotten to lie down when he died.” Roselle’s son Judson Cross was the president of the historically Black Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi.
When she gets to her own life, Lippard starts with her birth in New York Hospital on 14 April 1937, and her first memory: hearing seagulls’ cries “muted in the morning fog” from her crib in her grandparents’ cabin on the coast of Maine where she has spent part of eighty-eight summers. Today, Lippard is connected to the Maine art world through her friendship with artist/activist Natasha Mayers; they appear together in Richard Kane’s CARLO . . . and his Merry Band of Artists, 2024, a documentary tribute to painter Carlo Pittore (1943–2005).
Lippard was an art history major at Smith “mostly,” she admits, “so I could go to Paris my junior year.” She made the rounds while abroad, including Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17, returning to college to study printmaking with Leonard Baskin. Later, living in New York City, she landed a job in the library at the Museum of Modern Art.
The cover of Stuff features Lippard’s photo Sunday Morning, courtesy of New Village Press.
Stuff includes a wealth of priceless anecdotes, including an opportunity to interpret from French “(badly)” for Joan Miró. She relates, “When Miró came into a room of his show at MoMA as it was being installed, he pointed to The Farm, which he hadn’t seen in decades: ‘J’ai fait ça, moi!’ he said with childlike glee.”
Books, her “best company” growing up, led Lippard to want to be a writer from a young age, and writing prevailed over making art. Her first publication, The Prints and Drawings of Philip Evergood, came out in 1966. From there she built a wide-ranging library of increasingly significant writings.
Lippard dislikes the title art critic: “I’ve always been an advocate, not an adversary.” That said, she has taken on some of the villains of the art world while championing artists’ rights. In 1970, she protested the nearly all-male Whitney Biennial and joined a NO MORE CENSORSHIP conga line that danced up and down the Guggenheim’s spiral ramp after the museum canceled a Hans Haacke exhibition.
Curatorial work also went against the establishment grain. Exhibitions like the 1982 Working Women / Working Artists / Working Together offered lessons about “working beyond the artworld’s white walls.” Lippard loved “the certainty of being a lefty activist.” And the danger: she recounts some scary trips to Central America to bring attention to American intervention in the region.
Relationships, including marriage to jazz tenor sax player and artist Robert Ryman, are described with friendly candor. Lippard gives an affectionate shout-out to her son, Ethan Ryman, who in his early forties “succumbed” to “the family business” and became a visual artist.
Apropos a collection of crosses on the walls of her New Mexico home, Lippard states that she is an atheist, but qualifies it. “[A]fter several strange experiences and charting my dreams for several years, I must acknowledge that some incomprehensible energy exists beyond our ken.” Elsewhere, she admits to being horrified at the idea of an afterlife. “When I die, I die. I’m not interested in hanging around for eternity.”
“When I tell my friends back east that I’m off the grid,” Lippard writes, “they tend to agree that I always have been, with no idea that it is a physical fact.” Her life in Galisteo is built around community and comrades—and preserving cultural history.
“My room is a site of memory, fondness, joy, ruminations, occasional regrets,” Lippard writes at the beginning of her book,” adding, “but if I had written this forty or fifty years ago, the ‘stuff’ would have been very different.” Glad she held out.
This review originally appeared in the November–December 2024 issue of Art New England (Copyright Art New England, all rights reserved).
Read an excerpt of Lucy Lippard’s Stuff: Instead of a Memoir.
Lucy Lippard’s Life on the Frontlines of Art podcast.
Ethan Ryman, photo of Lucy Lippard, courtesy of New Village Press.