Lawrence Gipe

Lawrence Gipe (born 1962 in Baltimore, Maryland), is an American painter, independent curator, and Associate Professor of 2D studies at The University of Arizona, Tucson. He received a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University (1984) and an MFA from the Otis/Parsons Institute of Art and Design, Los Angeles (1986). He maintains a studio practice in Los Angeles, splitting his time between California and Arizona.[1]

Gipe's work utilizes “irredeemable” imagery sourced from an archive of business magazines (specifically, Fortune), propaganda tracts, social realism photography and other officially "sanctioned" artworks approved by politically-orientated bodies (such as the former Soviet Union, countries in the former Eastern Bloc, and China). His paintings translate small black and white images into large-scale works, saturated with color, in an ongoing series called The Century of Progress Museum. Severed from their original contexts, these reinterpretations encourage the viewer to reconstruct the original image's ideological landscape.

Artist and writer David Humphrey describes Gipe's practice thus, "The great mass of pictures left behind by history has become a kind of second nature for many contemporary artists. Lawrence Gipe has been an intrepid painter from this archive, selecting, representing, and recontextualizing second and third hand sources. With a keen eye for authoritarian rhetorics, Gipe refigures period photographs as paintings, while slyly balancing connoisseurship and interrogation.”[2] In his review of Gipe's The Last Picture Show (1999) exhibition at Joseph Helman (New York), critic Donald Kuspit writes in Artforum, "By showing us the tricks of the painting and photography trades, by heightening his effects until they become vulgarly evident, Gipe suggests that art as such is a species of rhetoric, adding no substance to what it renders but only “orating” it in a convincing way."[3] As an organizer of, and participant in, the group exhibition One Year: The Art of Politics in Los Angeles (2018) at Glendale’s Brand Library and Art Center, Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight felt that the show had taken "the defensible position that on some level all art is political."[4]

Gipe has received two NEA Individual Fellowship Grants (Painting, 1989 and Works on Paper, 1996). A mid-career survey, 3 Five-Year Plans: Lawrence Gipe, 1990-2005, was organized in 2006 by Marilyn Zeitlin at the ASU Art Museum, Tempe at Arizona State University. In 2001, Gipe was commissioned to create a mural for the lobby of the Federal Reserve Bank Headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. In 2014, Gipe won a University of Arizona Confluencenter Faculty Collaboration and Innovation Grant for Documenting Operation Streamline: an ongoing drawing project, and published Operation Streamline: A Reader with funds from the grant (2015), combining his sketches from Federal Court with press clippings and original research from University of Arizona journalism students. These drawings have been used to illustrate articles and news features on Univision, Univision Nacional, PBS NewsHour, AZ Daily Star, Tucson Weekly, CBS News, Center for Latin American Studies, and Arizona Public Media. In 2019, Gipe participated in a residency at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. As part of the residency, Gipe taught a two-week course, had an exhibition, and held a lecture. He gave students his perspectives about contemporary art, and emphasized the importance of conceptual development and social interaction between artists and the community.[5]

Selected solo museum exhibitions include the Laguna Art Museum (Laguna Beach, CA), Amerika-Haus (Berlin), Worcester Art Museum, (Worcester, Massachusetts), Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen (Düsseldorf), and The Chrysler Museum (Norfolk, VA). Permanent collections include The Brooklyn Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA),[6] San Jose Museum of Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Yale University Library, Zimmerli Archive (Rutgers University, New Jersey), Boise Art Museum, Cincinnati Art Museum, The Ringling Museum, the Federal Reserve Board Fine Arts Program, and the Norton Museum of Art.