Jonathan Lippincott at Lynden Video

January 19, 2012

The 1960s and 1970s, when Peg Bradley was amassing the collection now on view at Lynden, were rich and important decades for modern sculpture. The founding of the NEA, the proliferation of Percent for Art programs, and growing interest on the part of artists in showing work outdoors and exploring industrial fabrication resulted in an outpouring of new work.

The question of how to make these very large works—too large for an artist’s studio, and often requiring highly specialized fabrication for their realization—was one that Donald Lippincott and Roxanne Everett set about answering when they founded Lippincott, Inc. in North Haven, Connecticut in 1966. Lippincott was the first fabricator dedicated exclusively to making large scale sculpture, and the model Lippincott and Everett established for producing and financing these projects launched a new era of collaboration between artists and fabricators.

In July of 2011, Jonathan Lippincott, Don’s son and author of Large Scale: Fabricating Sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s, came to the Lynden Sculpture Garden for an illustrated talk. According to Jonathan, when Peg Bradley visited North Haven in 1969, she “delighted Don and Roxanne by buying [William] Underhill’s Ursa Major and [Clement] Meadmore’s Upstart I on the spot.” She later purchased Meadmore’s Double Up, Isaac Witkin’s Kumo and Trio by George Sugarman, as well as acquiring works from other sources that were originally fabricated at Lippincott. These artists and many others including Claes Oldenburg, Louise Nevelson, Barnett Newman, and Ellsworth Kelly, came to Lippincott, and Jonathan grew up among them and their projects.

Please enjoy the talk, presented here in full. For more info on Large Scale, please go to the official website.


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