Susan Lipper
Susan Lipper (b. 1953) is a New York-based artist whose photographic practice centers on travel and the creation of fictional narratives that function like literary works. After receiving an MFA from Yale in 1983, she embarked on a series of American road trips. Influenced by Walker Evans, she saw photographing America, and being a woman, as a means to question the nation’s conditioned promise of utopia while intertwining personal and political agendas that provoke a response in the viewer. Lipper’s quests led to a trilogy of photobooks: Grapevine (1988–1992), trip (1993–1999), and Domesticated Land (2012–2016), which follow America’s development from east to west. The Grapevine Series, which became her first monograph, visualizes a primordial Eden, and is the result of an over five-year-long collaboration with adopted family and friends. 800 miles further west, trip is a synthetic, curious expedition on and off interstate 10 in a ‘vacant’ Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. In the final piece of her trilogy, Domesticated Land, Lipper situates herself in the Californian desert, depicting a dystopian future that informs a critique of the present.
Lipper has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Public collections her work is held in include the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York); the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston); and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London).