Marion Barthelme Lecture: Lucy Lippard

Lucy Lippard, Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West

Award-winning author, curator, and activist Lucy R. Lippard is one of America’s most influential writers on contemporary art, a pioneer in the fields of cultural geography, conceptualism, and feminist art. Hailed by The New York Times for “the breadth of her reading and the comprehensiveness with which she considers the things that define place,” Lippard now turns her keen eye to the politics of land use and art in an evolving New West in Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West.

Working from her own lived experience in a New Mexico village and inspired by gravel pits in the landscape, Lippard weaves a number of fascinating themes—among them fracking, mining, land art, adobe buildings, ruins, Indian land rights, the Old West, tourism, photography, and water—into a tapestry that illuminates the relationship between culture and the land. From threatened Native American sacred sites to the history of uranium mining, she offers a skeptical examination of the “subterranean economy.”

Featuring more than two hundred gorgeous color images, Undermining is a must-read for anyone eager to explore a new way of understanding the relationship between art and place in a rapidly shifting society.

Public Program of The Menil Collection, Houston, TX. May 03, 2019.