An unconventional study in contemporary art practices, cultural geography, and landscape, Lucy R. Lippard’s Undermining (The New Press, 2014) is an idiosyncratic consideration of many interwoven themes: the visual and social connections between mining, restoration, eco-arts, the history of southwest landscape and art, memory, monuments, ruins, walking, the Old and New West, adobe architecture, ruins, dams, water, archaeology, gender, tourism, and environmental politics. Lippard lives alongside Native American pueblos and reservations, and has written extensively on contemporary Native American art. One of her goals is to reintegrate the art with its sources in the “real world”—(as in Carl Andre’s description of the road as the ideal artwork)—not merely by visual inspiration but by a certain fusion of motives. She will present the text in a series of interrelated essays with a parallel visual narrative of approximately 150 illustrations.
Lucy R. Lippard was born in New York City and grew up in Louisiana, Virginia, Maine, and Connecticut. She has been a freelance writer, editor, curator, lecturer, and activist most of her life, focusing on contemporary art and cultural criticism. Her twenty-one books include Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (University of California Press, 1992), The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (New Press, 1998), and Down Country: The Tano of the Galisteo Basin, 1250–1782 (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2010). Since the 1980s she has focused on the American West’s multicultural landscape and land use in relation to public art, eco-art, and place-specific art. She lives off the grid in a village in rural New Mexico, where she edits the local community newsletter and works on watershed restoration, community planning, and archaeological site protection.