Beth Lipman
Beth Lipman received her BFA in Glass and Fibers from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, in 1994. She has exhibited her work throughout the Northeast region, at such places as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Bronx Museum of Art, the Fine Art Museum of Long Island, and the Heller Gallery.
Beth has earned awards from the Peter S. Reed Foundation, the Brooklyn Arts Council/ Department of Cultural Affairs, and the American Scandinavian Foundation. She served as the Education Director at UrbanGlass from 1997 to 2000 and has taught at Pratt Fine Art Center, New York University – UrbanGlass, Parsons School of Design, and the Bard Graduate Center.
Wisconsin-based artist Beth Lipman’s portfolio of work resembles the glassware of the 17th and 18th century contained in the Museum of American Glass’ historical glass collection. Instead of the functional dinnerware glass of old, Lipman uses the glass structures to examine material culture, excess, morality, consumerism, and the masters of the past. Lipman has exhibited her work at museums and galleries such as the Museum of Wisconsin Art, Des Moines Art Center, and the Museum of Craft and Design. She has also been a resident artist at the Alturas Foundation and a Creative Glass fellow at WheatonArts.
Her compositions are sometimes mountains of assembled chaos with broken glassware spilling onto each other. In the case of her piece from her Creative Glass fellowship in 2001, displayed here, it’s a milk glass tea tray. As the name suggests, the composition takes after the 18th-century Swiss painter Jean-Étienne Liotard’s 1781 to 1783 painting Still Life, Tea Set. Lipman mimics Liotard’s tea tray in its appearance, from the placement of the tea set to the tipped over cups on saucer plates to upturned spoons. However, instead of Chinese porcelain with Orientalist lacquer design of Liotard’s set, Lipman’s piece is milk glass with paintings depicting scenes of women.
