Alturas Foundation Residency
Peregrine White Cradle, component for House Album. Photo credit: Pilgrim Society and Pilgrim Hall Museum
The Artist in Residence Program selects artists to explore and reflect their vision of American culture. Alturas Foundation grants support to one artist or artist collective at a time enabling them to examine in-depth their new ideas and creative process.
Alturas Foundation selected Beth Lipman as its Artist in Residence for 2019 to develop a new direction in her work. Her residency is devoted to a project entitled House Album, a selective portrait of the United States that explores issues surrounding agency, identity, and memory.
The work is composed of two and three dimensional domestic objects that represent significant individuals and critical episodes in America’s history, creating an allegory of our collective home. The concept is generated from two specific traditions of defining domestic interiors: the late nineteenth century pastime of scrapbooking of miniature houses (two dimensional) and the Period Room (three dimensional), an exhibition construct utilized in museums from the early twentieth century to the present day. In both of these applications individuals aspire to create the ideal home, and by extension their perceived individual identity.
The initial exhibition of House Album will be featured at the Museum of Art and Design in New York in May 2020 as part of Beth’s retrospective exhibition there entitled Beth Lipman: Collective Elegy.