A critic, curator, author, and activist, Lucy is described as a “a canonical figure who held no truck with canons, who disdained art history only to become art history” in a 2023 article by Megan O’Grady for the New York Review of Books, on the occasion of Lippard’s recent non-memoir memoir, “Stuff: Instead of a Memoir” (New Village Press, 2023).

In her countless articles, essays, 30 books, and curatorial projects, Lippard contributed mightily to the intellectual groundwork for feminist, conceptual, political, and environmental art. Her 1973 book “Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972” (University of California Press, 1997) is a seminal work on conceptual art. The book inspired “Materializing ‘Six Years,’ ” a 2012 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum that paid homage to Lippard’s unique impact on curation, art criticism, and the viewing experience. Two of Lippard’s best-known books, “Overlay” (Pantheon, 1983), which she conceived during a year on a farm in England, and “The Lure of the Local” (The New Press, 1997), explore the relationships between art, time, and place. In “Overlay,” Lippard remembers “what we have forgotten about art – its social origins and communal function – by looking back to times and places where art was inseparable from larger contexts,” writes Suzi Gablik in a 1983 review of “Overlay” for The New York Times.

Lippard’s first job in 1958 was as a page in the Museum of Modern Art library, where she also met Sol LeWitt, then a night receptionist, who went on to become an influential conceptual and minimalist artist and lifelong collaborator.

In 1971, Lippard conceived and presented “Twenty-Six Contemporary Women Artists,” a landmark exhibit in feminist art at the Aldrich Art Museum in Connecticut. Five decades later, it inspired “52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone” also at the Aldrich, which included works by the original 1971 artists alongside 26 emerging female-identifying and nonbinary creators.

Alongside her writing, Lippard has been an avid organizer. She was an early member of the Art Workers’ Coalition, co-founded West-East Bag, Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D), and Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America, as well as Heresies: A Feminist Journal of Art and Politics and the artists’-book center Printed Matter. In 1970, the Ad Hoc Women Artists Committee, which Lippard helped found, protested the Whitney Museum of American Art's Annual, demanding that half the artists should be women, and of those, half should be women of color. That dissent led to the creation of the Women's Art Registry.

Lippard has been a visiting professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, University of Colorado-Boulder, the University of Queensland, Australia, and the University of Wyoming. She has received nine honorary doctorate degrees. Her awards include two National Endowment for the Arts grants in criticism, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Criticism from the College Art Association, the Smith College Medal, and the Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies Award for Excellence, among several others.

Lippard spent her childhood in New York, Louisiana, Virginia, Connecticut, and Maine and spent 35 years in New York City before seeking out a life in the desert. She now lives in an off-grid house that she built in the New Mexican village of Galisteo, where she has served as the editor of the monthly El Puente de Galisteo newsletter for 28 years. Lippard earned a bachelor’s degree from Smith College and a master’s from New York University. She was a friend and, for a time, a tenant of Dorothea and Leo Rabkin on Grand Street in New York City.