Lawrence Gipe

American, 1962

Lawrence Gipe’s work ranges across the disciplines of painting, drawing, curating, video and archive-driven installations. The narratives that bind them are themes of power, propaganda, and a desire to analyze semiotics and codes of meaning in visual culture. Gipe’s practice is an ongoing investigation into an archive of coded and often culturally irredeemable images, gleaned from decades of seeking out ideologically tainted photo annuals, and vintage magazines dealing with energy, business and the military industrial complex. Gipe has had 60 solo exhibitions in U.S. galleries and museums in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Munich, Berlin, Düsseldorf (Kunstverein Düsseldorf).

Currently, he splits his time between Los Angeles, CA, and Tucson, AZ, where he is an Associate Professor of Studio Art at the University of Arizona. Gipe has received two NEA Individual Fellowship Grants (Painting, 1989 and Works on Paper, 1996). A mid-career survey, “3 Five-Year Plans: Lawrence Gipe, 1990-2005,” was organized in 2006 by Marilyn Zeitlin at the Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, Arizona. Gipe has prioritized drawing as a primary medium, and had three solo shows in 2015, including “Where We Were, and How We Got There” at Lora Schlesinger Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, which featured a 50-ft. graphite mural drawing. His last solo exhibition in New York was at Alexander Grey Associates (2007) and he work is currently available at Lora Schlesinger Gallery, Santa Monica, CA, Paul Mahder Gallery in Healdsburg, CA, and George Billis Gallery, NY, NY. In 2014,

Gipe won a University of Arizona Confluence Center Grant for “Documenting Operation Streamline,” an on-going drawing project recording the plight of illegal immigrants on their journey through the Arizona court system via the controversial “Operation Streamline” process. “Operation Streamline: A Reader” was published with funds from the grant (2015), which combined sketches made in Federal Court with press clippings and original research from UA journalist students.

Courtesy of Lawrence Gipe

Courtesy Otis College of Art and Design