The Sixties and Seventies were a time of rebellion and change in the world at large and in the New York art world. As you enter Lucy R. Lippard: Notes from the Radical Whirlwind at the Vladem Contemporary in Santa Fe through August 9, 2026, the white gallery space appears quiet, but the art that confronts you is done by artists living, creating, and collaborating in a tumultuous, exciting time.
Post-war eclecticism, minimalism, conceptualism, feminism, environmentalism, and activism – these were the movements swirling in downtown Manhattan. Writer, curator, rabble-rouser, and activist Lucy R. Lippard seemed always to be near the center it all.
The two-floor exhibition is just a fraction of the paintings, prints, sculptures, photographs, and art books that artists gifted to Lucy across four decades. To walk through it chronicles every important trend in American (and global) art and a “who’s who” of contemporary art in the latter half of the 20th century.
Take a look through it all in our Flickr album.
At the center of the first gallery are pieces by minimal-conceptualists Carl Andre (a twisted piece of chanelling lying on the floor that could have jumped out of a dumpster) and Sol Lewitt (a pristine grid sculpture). Nearby are super-minimalists Larry Poons and Ad Rhinehart, where you can see the hidden black-on-black squares if you peer through the glass just right.
But as the exhibition points out, Lucy didn’t just have the typical artist-curator relationship with the people whose work is on the wall. Her mentor Ad Rhinehardt asked her to pen his monograph for his ground-breaking 1966 retrospective at the Jewish Museum where is black-on-black canvases begged the question, “Is painting at an end?”
Lucy and Carl Andre worked side-by-side in 1969 to organize the historic Art Workers’ Coalition to advocate for artists’ rights inside the art establishment. She and Sol Lewitt met at entry-level jobs at MoMA, but when Sol published his influential 1967 essay on Conceptualism in Artforum magazine, Lucy built upon his foundation with other essays and produced her acclaimed Numbers exhibitions across the country (1996 – 1972) to show conceptual and minimalist art to new audiences.
Lucy and Sol Lewitt championed the work of post-minimalist, Eva Hesse. Lucy included Eva’s work in her 1966 exhibition Eccentric Abstractionism at Fischbach Gallery, and both worked tirelessly to keep Eva’s work front and center after her untimely passing in 1970 at age 34.
The exhibition underscores the tight relationships among artists during a period of rampant experimentation, happenings, pop art, anti-war protests, and organizations protesting discrimination and advocating for justice. All forms of expression were welcomed – from performance pieces to typewritten instructions to mail art.
The array of feminist and political/social protest art in the exhibition reinforces the activist theme that runs through Lucy’s life. Works by Louise Bourgeois, Harmony Hammond, Ana Mendieta, Faith Ringgold, Mary Beth Edelson, and many more are shown – including the founders of A.I.R., New York’s first women-operated cooperative gallery, and the Heresies Collective, who published the first feminist art journal. Over time, their collective pressure worked, as museums and galleries finally opened up to exhibiting works by women and people of color.
The last section downstairs contains works on the Vietnam War, civil rights, Indigenous rights, the Cold War, and the risks from nuclear power. Lucy and her fellow artist were extremely active in response to injustice. In 1965-1967, they created the Angry Arts Festival through their collective, Artists and Writers Protest the Vietnam War to mobilize cultural leaders against U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In 1975, Artists Meeting for Cultural Change successfully lobbied for disenfranchised artist’s inclusion in the Whitney Biennial. In 1979, Artists Against Nuclear Madness mobilized.
In 1984, Lucy and other colleagues led Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America. Over1,100 artists and activists mobilized to create over 200 events in 27 cities. (Click here to read our 2022 post about the University of New Mexico Art Museum’s exhibition on this mobilization.)
Lucy’s philosophy: “Artists alone cannot change the world. Neither can anyone else alone. But we can choose to be part of the world that is changing.”
The second-floor gallery is dedicated to artists books – a movement that started around the same time that everything else was happening. Many artists felt the high-end art market on the East Coast was too elitist. Many artists wanted to bypass the whole thing and create affordable art.
Lucy Lippard, Sol Lewitt and others decided to open a storefront in 1976 where anyone could buy inexpensive books created by artists…books that were themselves affordable art! Although it moved from Tribeca, to Soho, and Chelsea, it’s still selling artist’s books fifty years later!
The upstairs gallery is a tribute to the decades of “affordable art” perseverance.
You can wander through imagining you are in the Printed Matter bookshop in the late 1970s, browsing through all the different projects, statements, picture books, and manifestoes flowing out of the Downtown New York art scene!
The gallery also contains some of the artist books that started it all by Ed Rucha.
But maybe some of the best books are those found in the back reading room – some of the 30 influential treatises written by Lucy herself, publications that document art, life, and society in our times.
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