Large Scale: A Talk with Jonathan Lippincott

July 13, 2011 - 6:30pm - 8:30pm

LARGE SCALE

Free to members or with admission to the sculpture garden.

Book signing follows the talk. Boswell Book Company will be on hand to sell the book. (To reserve your copy of Large Scale: Fabricating Sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s, email staff@lyndensculpturegarden.org. Books are $45 each.)

The garden remains open until dusk, so there will be plenty of time for a stroll before or after the talk.

The 1960s and 1970s, when Peg Bradley was amassing the collection now on view at Lynden, were rich and important decades for modern sculpture. The founding of the NEA, the proliferation of Percent for Art programs, and growing interest on the part of artists in showing work outdoors and exploring industrial fabrication resulted in an outpouring of new work.

The question of how to make these very large works—too large for an artist’s studio, and often requiring highly specialized fabrication for their realization—was one that Donald Lippincott and Roxanne Everett set about answering when they founded Lippincott, Inc. in North Haven, Connecticut in 1966. Lippincott was the first fabricator dedicated exclusively to making large scale sculpture, and the model Lippincott and Everett established for producing and financing these projects launched a new era of collaboration between artists and fabricators.

We are delighted to welcome Jonathan Lippincott, Don’s son and author of Large Scale: Fabricating Sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s, to the Lynden Sculpture Garden for an illustrated talk. According to Jonathan, when Peg Bradley visited North Haven in 1969, she “delighted Don and Roxanne by buying [William] Underhill’s Ursa Major and [Clement] Meadmore’s Upstart I on the spot.” She later purchased Meadmore’s Double Up, Isaac Witkin’s Kumo and Trio by George Sugarman, as well as acquiring works from other sources that were originally fabricated at Lippincott. These artists and many others including Claes Oldenburg, Louise Nevelson, Barnett Newman, and Ellsworth Kelly, came to Lippincott, and Jonathan grew up among them and their projects.

In his talk at Lynden, Jonathan will take a close look at several of the sculptures in the collection that were fabricated at Lippincott, and will consider other works produced at Lippincott by artists represented in the Lynden collection: Mark di Suvero, Charles Ginnever, Lyman Kipp, Robert Murray, Forrest Myers, Tony Smith, and Tal Streeter. He will draw on the massive photo archive created by Roxanne Everett that documents the artists and their sculptures, the welders and crew, and he will discuss the history of their groundbreaking work. The talk, like Large Scale, will provide a fascinating window into the fabrication process; the road from shop to galleries, museums, private collections and public art shows; and into what many have called the golden age of public art.

About Jonathan Lippincott
Jonathan Lippincott studied studio art and art history at Swarthmore College, graduating in 1989. Over the next few years, he worked at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts as a cook and handyman, at the Yale University Art Gallery as an art handler, and as a dessert baker in Providence, Rhode Island. In 1993 he moved to New York City to begin work in publishing, and a year later he joined Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where he is currently the design manager. Since 2000 he has also worked independently as art director and designer for a range of illustrated books about architecture, landscape, and fine art.

Jonathan Lippincott will be speaking at the Manilow Sculpture Park at Governors State University in University Park, Illinois on July 14. More details here.

More information is available at www.largescalethebook.com.


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