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AUTHOR, AUTHOR

Phillips Academy counts among its alumni and faculty many prominent writers.
In this issue, the magazine highlights five who are making a mark on the literary scene.
The "Andover Bookshelf" section that follows makes note of some recent works
by these and other members of the community.

Page 2

Lucy Lippard

In New York's art circles and on hundreds of Web sites, Lucy Lippard ’54 is regarded as a popular feminist, art critic, theorist, author and political activist. (She prefers "cultural critic.") But in her home community of Galisteo, N.M., she's just the person who edits the village newsletter. "It's a very different world," she says. "Most people here don't know much about my work."

The anonymity suits her. Out West, where her grandparents and great-grandparents lived, she is detached from the "power-based, competitive, incestuous" art world she used to write about. After devoting two decades of her life to political activism and the feminist art movement in New York in the 1960s-1980s, Lippard now enjoys a more tranquil lifestyle writing about cultural geography and working on open space and land issues. Eight years ago, she traded her life in New York for a little house in New Mexico where she lives off the electric company's service grid and spent her first three winters reading by the dim light of an oil lamp. "I've had my moment in the mainstream," she says. "I feel very comfortable here."

Her latest book, On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art and Place, is an extended chapter of her previous book Lure of the Local, which examines the relationship of culture to place. "It's more about staying home than traveling," she says. "It looks at how much people move around trying to find their place."

Lippard was born in New York City and lived in New Orleans and Charlottesville, Va., before enrolling at Abbot Academy in 1952. She says she knew well before she arrived that she wanted to be a writer. After earning a B.A. degree from Smith College, she worked with the American Friends Service Committee in a Mexican village—a first and crucial experience of the Third World. Later, she earned an M.A. degree in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. Part of every summer of her life has been spent in Georgetown, Maine. "I would venture to say that places have profoundly influenced my life, probably more than people have," she says.

In 1968, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Since 1966, Lippard has published 20 books on feminism, art, politics and place and has received numerous awards and accolades from literary critics and art associations. "The art world never turned me on much," she says, "but I liked writing about art because of the challenge; it's almost impossible to put the visual into words."

An early organizer and co-founder of several feminist art organizations, Lippard says she is 100 percent feminist. "For 10 years or so I thought and wrote primarily about women in art, women in politics and in society. It certainly changed me for the better."

A freelance writer all her life—she claims to have a problem with authority, and therefore does well as her own boss—Lippard recently received a grant to write her 21st book, Scratching the Surface, about the vortex of land and lives in the Galisteo Basin. It's the first time she's had the luxury of focusing on just one assignment. "I've never before been able to afford to have one thing be all-consuming. This is my most relaxed project," she says.

—Kennan Daniel

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