In the Studio: Beth Lipman

Guest Artist Pavilion Project (GAPP) resident

Beth Lipman talks to us about her forthcoming TMA installation ReGift, opening August 12.

The relationship between Toledo and glass is a long and storied one, containing history in both industry and art. How and who we remember in that history are questions that spurred Wisconsin-based artist Beth Lipman to create her latest project as the Toledo Museum of Art’s GAPP resident.

The seeds for her site-specific installation, titled ReGift, were planted in 2018, when her research on Museum co-founder Florence Scott Libbey began. The resulting glass components were created across multiple studios—some pieces made during her guest artist residency in the TMA hot shop in 2022 and others in her own studio in Wisconsin. They will form a recreation of the parlor the Libbeys occupied together, sized between miniature and full scale. The project fulfills the GAPP residency’s ultimate aim: making space for experimentation in glass.

Lipman’s work has been acquired by numerous museums including the Corning Museum of Glass, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Kemper Museum for Contemporary Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Jewish Museum.

Art Matters: The muse for your GAPP project, Florence Scott Libbey, died in 1938. How did someone who lived nearly a century ago inspire this work?

Beth Lipman: Obviously I’m coming in as an outsider, but it seemed to me that the general focus on the founding narrative of the Toledo Museum of Art was on Mr. Edward Libbey1, even though his wife Florence was a massive part of it. ReGift is just a way to call attention to someone who perhaps is a little bit more invisible and to introduce the visitors and the community at large to her contributions. It also links to the City Beautiful movement2 , which swept across the country nationally at the turn of the century, to Florence’s mission and view.

AM: Where does the idea of regifting come into play?

BL: The real linchpin for the project came when I discovered through the Museum’s historian, Julie McMaster, that some of Florence’s only pieces of furniture that she gifted upon her death to the Museum were deaccessioned in the 1990s. Among what was still left in the archives was their custom illustrated bookplate, which was the genesis of the sculptural installation. It provides the only existing image of the interior of their home when they lived there. Some of the furniture that was deaccessioned is featured in that bookplate. ReGift is symbolically regifting these objects, that story and the identity of Florence back to the community and institution. It’s a way of revising communal priorities. What is worth preserving? What has been marginalized?

AM: In what ways did you feel connected with Florence during your research?

BL: I think she was possibly a simpatico soul, clearly passionate and curious in a way I can identify with. Also, maybe it’s a bit of a romantic lens on the time, but it seemed her age was a period of great optimism in some ways. She lived through the second industrial revolution, with an overt embrace of the ideas of socialism and democracy. The City Beautiful movement led everyone to believe that they could make their life a little better by beautifying or creating, caring for the environment, caring for one another.

AM: How does that differ from what you perceive today?

BL: We are not there anymore. The fulcrum has pivoted to a valuation of autonomy and individualism, an egocentric take. So it’s not just about Florence, in some ways it is also about activating the institution to reengage the values that were lost over time, a kind of collective, communal empathy.

AM: Let’s talk about your other influences and references. You cite the decorative arts as a source of inspiration, though they’re often dismissed as less serious than some other art mediums.

BL: Decorative arts are historically the underdog, particularly in Western European culture, and there’s a lot of power in that. Decorative objects manifested for very different reasons than traditional fine art. Every object in the decorative field is created with some intention of negotiating the human body, whether it’s used functionally or to beautify a space. The human figure will never be represented in my work, because objects are surrogates for a human body, basically.

AM: You also mention deep time as a reference.

BL: Deep time is a term that was coined by John McPhee in his book about geological time, called

Basin and Range. When you factor in the age of the earth, it’s mostly pre-history or pre-human with the smallest little shred of time that humans have been on this planet. All of my work deals with time. I use different points in time and history to investigate the present moment. My initial investigations were at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, which led to the incorporation of depictions of paleo flora, plants that existed through five mass extinctions for hundreds of millions of years. are they going to mean after humans are gone? through the genre of still life, which is constantly reminding you that life is brief. All the symbolism—the candle wick with the smoke, the fire just burnt out, the fly eating the grape—these are symbols of entropy, basically. These types of still lifes, vanitas, all define time or the fleetingness of time.

A thousand years from now or post-history, what are all of these objects that we surround ourselves with, that we value, what are they going to mean after humans are gone? It becomes a layer of detritus, another layer of strata within earth’s time. A lot of the recent work involves ways of compressing the visual representation of what came before, where are we now, what could come after.

AM: What are some ways you’ve communicated that in your own work, how has that inspiration emerged?

BL: In the mid-2000s, I read Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker essays about climate change. It became urgent to express this existential threat. How to incorporate the language of deep time? It led to a residency

AM: Why do you choose to work in colorless glass?

BL: Colorless glass or glass that has very little color invokes a liminal state. It is essentially a distillation of an idea. It is simultaneously something that you are seeing through yet you’re unable to fully grasp it at any given time because the forms change with light and the body’s movement. It’s constantly elusive thanks to the way light travels through and is reflected back through the material.

AM: You mentioned the value of colorless glass providing a liminal moment for the viewer, being something more elusive than other kinds of materials we might be able to look at and feel secure that it looks just one way. In what ways do you feel liminal as a person?

BL: One’s relationship to time could be construed as liminal. It spans to eternity and is also over in a blink of an eye. The nature of creative practice in the studio is a process of going in and out of a flow state.

AM: Your mother and grandmother were both artists; how did that come to influence your own personal career path?

BL: I think what my mother gave me in particular was confidence. She designed and made limited edition hand-painted objects that were sold both wholesale and retail. She financially supported our family with her art, and so her example made it very easy for me to pursue an artistic practice. My parents were unwaveringly supportive.

AM: Beyond the Museum and what you discovered there, what else have you found yourself enjoying about Toledo?

BL: You have such good food! I am a huge fan. The Middle Eastern markets and their fatayer and flatbreads are so great. During my residency visits, part of me thought maybe I should move to Toledo.