Headwaters

by Lucy R. Lippard

Compiling works from nearly five decades, Headwaters (and Other Short Fictions) provides the first comprehensive overview of the narrative and experimental writing of Lucy R. Lippard. While she is best known for her pioneering work as an art writer and activist, Lippard’s fiction helps frame her broader impact on contemporary culture. Headwaters anthologizes over fifty short works, many previously unpublished. These often experimental vignettes showcase the range of her literary voice while also challenging our understanding of her oeuvre. Sometimes speculative or fragmented, yet always compelling, these pieces range from short-form narrative stories and conceptual fiction to visual essays and political prose. Included are excerpts from two never-released novels, as well as collaborations with artists Robert Barry, Sol LeWitt, and Jerry Kearns. Lucy Lippard is author of thirty books on contemporary art and cultural criticism. She has curated some fifty exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.

360 pages, Hardcover

Published December 1, 2024

About the author

Since 1966, Lippard has published 20 books on feminism, art, politics and place and has received numerous awards and accolades from literary critics and art associations. A 2012 exhibition on her seminal book, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object at the Brooklyn Museum, titled "Six Years": Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art", cites Lippard's scholarship as its point of entry into a discussion about conceptual art during its era of emergence, demonstrating her crucial role in the contemporary understanding of this period of art production and criticism. Her research on the move toward dematerialization in art making has formed a cornerstone of contemporary art scholarship and discourse.

Co-founder of Printed matter (an art bookstore in New York City centered around artist's books), the Heresies Collective, Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D), Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America, and other artists' organizations, she has also curated over 50 exhibitions, done performances, comics, guerrilla theater, and edited several independent publications the latest of which is the decidedly local La Puente de Galisteo in her home community in Galisteo, New Mexico. She has infused aesthetics with politics, and disdained disinterestedness for ethical activism.