Stuart Klipper
'Photographer Stuart Klipper, was born in the Bronx borough of New York City in 1941. He lived in Stockholm, Sweden, but then moved to his current residence in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1970.
Klipper has made six journeys to Antarctica to take photographs. He has also worked in Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard, Alaska, and the area of Lapland irradiated by the Chernobyl disaster. Klipper became one of approximately 400 people to have stood at both the South Pole and the North Pole on July 15, 2009, when he visited the North Pole.
Other major forays have taken Klipper across the deserts of Israel and Sinai as well as the tropical rain forests of Costa Rica. Klipper's work has also taken him to Northern Australia, Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan.
He has logged thousands of miles traveling at sea while photographing on all of the Earth’s oceans and seas.
For over 30 years, Klipper traveled through the 50 United States, capturing photographs that crystallize the defining characteristics of American regions. He also photographed major physics and astronomy research installations throughout the United States and the Anasazi ruins of the Southwest.
Klipper has also photographed the cemeteries of World War I and memorials of the Western Front.
Klipper's photographs have been exhibited in and collected by major museums from both the United States and overseas. These include New York City's Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Walker Art Center, The Jewish Museum, The Israel Museum, The Victoria and Albert Museum, the Bonn Kunsthalle, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden.
The Guggenheim Foundation, The Bush Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and the Minnesota State Arts Board have all awarded Klipper multiple grants.
Klipper is also a recipient of the United States Navy’s Antarctic Service Medal.
Grants, honors, and fellowships John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, 1980, 1990 Bush Foundation (St. Paul), 1981, 1992 National Endowment for the Arts, 1976, 1979 National Endowment for the Humanities, 1981 McKnight Foundation, St. Paul/Mpls. – three grants The Minnesota State Arts Board – three grants The Jerome Foundaiton, 2003 The Bogliasco Foundation (N. Y. C. & Genoa, Italy, 2003 The National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, 1989, 1992, 1993, 1999, 2000
Nominee, McKnight Distinguished Minnesota Artist Award, 2005, 2006, 2007
Finalist, Bush Enduring Visions Award, 2008
Nominee, MacArthur Fellowship, 2008
Recipient of the United States Navy Antarctic Service Medal, 1989
Selected institutions in where work has been exhibited and/or collected
Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Minneapolis Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Houston Museum of Art, Houston The Jewish Museum, N. Y. C. The Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, N. Y.C. The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden Fotogalleriet, Oslo, Norway The Minnesota Museum of Art, St. Paul The New York Public Library, N. Y. C. The Library of Congress, Washington, D. C. The National Museum of American Art, Washington D. C. United States embassy, Santiago, Chile The Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Mass. The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England The Library of the Church of Later Day Saints, Salt Lake City The Museum of Contemporary Religious Art, St. Louis Kunsthalle of the German Republic, Bonn, Germany The Center for Creative Photography, Tucson The George Eastman House, Rochester, N. Y. S. The Winchester Museum, North Carolina The Milwaukee Museum of Art, Milwaukee The North Dakota Museum of Art The Nash Gallery, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis The Historical Society of Minnesota, Minneapolis The Historical Society Texas, Austin The Historical Society of Colorado, Denver The Weisman Museum of Art, University of Minnesota The University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor The University of Wyoming Museum of Art, Laramie The University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City Winthrop College gallery, South Carolina Prescott College gallery, Arizona Grinnell College gallery, Iowa Colorado College gallery, Colorado Carleton College gallery, Minnesota St. Olaf College gallery, Minnesota Jamestown College art gallery, North Dakota The High Museum of Art, Atlanta The Fernbank Museum of Art, Atlanta The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans The Canterbury Museum, Christchurch, New Zealand FermiLab, Ill.
Selected commissions: The State of Texas, Cray Research Corp., the State of Minnesota, First Banks Systems (Mpls.), the Valspar Corp. (Mpls.), the University of Minnesota.
Recent achievements dating to December, 2009
Selected exhibitions—solo: Disparate Georgraphies, Schmidt Dean Gallery in Philadelphia, 1998. Sixteen polar photographs, Arktis -Antarktis, the Kunsthalle des Deutschesrepublic, Bonn, Germany. 1998
Cardinal Points, at the University of Iowa Museum of Art. (Photographs from polar regions: Antarctica and Greenland, the tropical rain forests, the desert regions of Israel and the Sinai, the agricultural Great Plains)-- an exhibition catalogue was published. 1998 At Sea Near the Poles, at the Spencer Gallery, Wickford, R.I. 1999 Antarctica 99/00, Yancey Richardson Gallery, NYC, 2000 Selected Antarctic Work, Berler Gallery, Washington D.C., 2001 (Also shown in Denver and Christchurch, N.Z.
Selected American photographs, The Center for American Places, Harrisonburg, Va., 2001 Photographs from the Arctic and Antarctica, Smith-Dean Gallery, Phila., PA, 2001 Wyoming, Univ. of Wyo. Museum Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2001/02
In the Australian Outback, Gallery 360, Minneapolis, 2002 The United States, Candace Perich Gallery, Katonah, NY, 2002 Rock art, bush fire, termite mounds and other aspects of the outback of the Top End of Australia, Gallery 360, Mpls.,2002
Portraits about Pakistan, 1987, Icebox Gallery, Mpls., 2002 Antarctic 1: Views Along Antarctica’s First Highway, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Los Angeles, 2002
The Louisiana Purchase, Groveland Gallery, Minneapolis & Olson-Larsen Gallery, Des Moines, 2003
Selected photographs, Medtronics Corp. corporate headquarters, Minneapolis, 2006 Antarctica, Electrolift Artworks, Minneapolis, Minn. 2006 (+ other venues) 20 Years of photographing Louisiana, The Ogden Museum, New Orleans, 2008 Antarctic Photographs, City Museum of Charleston, S.C., 2009 Local Places – Remote Terrains, Olson Larsen Gallery, Des Moines, Iowa, 2009 The Dead Sea Region, Israel, The Basilica of St. Mary, Minneapolis, 2010
Selected exhibitions -group: Photography of New York City, Minneapolis Institute of Art. 1998 Sea Change, The Center for Creative Photography, Univ. of Arizona, Tucson.
(An eponymous book was published in conjunction with the exhibition and is in national distribution), 1998/99
American farms and farming, Candace Perish Gallery, Katonah, NY. (Traveled to Washington D. C.), 1998/99 Views from the Edge of the World, Marlborough Gallery, NYC. 1999 Claiming Title: Australian Aboriginal Artists and the Land, St, Olaf & Carleton Colleges, Northfield, Minn., 1999 The Infinite and the Intimate; Waterscapes of Stuart Klipper and Frank Gohlke, Dorsky Gallery, N.Y.C. 1999 An Eclectic Focus: Photographs from the Vernon Collection ( + catalogue), Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1999 Aqua, Gallerie Thierry Marlat, Paris, France 1999 Restructuring the Prairie, Grinnell College, 1999 The Mural as Muse, Deutsches Bank Gallery, NYC, 2000 earth sky, Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta,GA, 2000 Western Panoramas, Huntington Museum, Sta. Barbara, CA, 2001 I Love New York (W. T. C benefit), NYC, 2001 Melodrama, inaugural show, ARTIUM, Vitoria, Spain, 2002 Contemporary Desert Photography, Palm Springs Art Museum, 2005 Antarctic Visions & Voices, Carleton College, Northfield, Minn., 2005 Downriver: New Orleans before the flood, Minnesota Center for Photography, 2006 Midwestern View: Contemporary Photography in Minnesota, Pingyao International Photography Festival, Pingyao, China, 2007 Visions of Music, Acadiana Center for the Arts, Lafayette, La., 2007 Four Antarctic Photographers, Museum of Art, Univ. of Wyo., 2007 Photographs from the Ends of the Earth, Milwaukee Art Museum, 2007 Antarctica on Thin Ice, The United Nations, NYC, 2007 Remembering Dakota, The North Dakota Museum of Art, 2008 Animals –Them and Us, The North Dakota Museum of Art, 2009 NSF Antarctic Artists, Maryland Science Center, Baltimore, Md., 2009 New Orleans photographs, Mill City Museum, Minneapolis, 2009 The Minnesota Eye, College of Visual Arts, St. Paul, 2009
Summarized history of selected projects:
Polar regions and high latitude domains. Northern forays in each decade since I first sallied north in the 1960s. This roster includes: Newfoundland and Labrador; Iceland and Greenland; northern Scandinavia and Lapland; Svalbard and several smaller Arctic islands; the Arctic and North Atlantic Oceans – and polar ice pack; Alaska. And as of a half year ago, a crossing of the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean to the North Pole, visiting islands in Franz Josef Land en route. Bodies of work: Most North, Bearing South, Radiation in Lapland, To the North Pole; and several phases of On Antarctica.
In 1987 joined a sailing expedition to the Antarctic Peninsula. Following that daunting initiation to The Ice, made 5 other visits to the continent and its encircling seas (in 1989, 1992, 1993/4, 1999, 2000), all as a participant in the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. Was given an inordinate amount of air support, and made three long cruises on research icebreakers. Has attained access to more of that near-extraterrestrial continent than most who have ever ventured there.
The World in a Few States – the American regions work being made since 1979. It began with a commission to photograph the cultural and geographical identities of Minnesota, South Dakota, and Montana. TWFS is an ongoing endeavor. Its ever-expanding inventories now number in the neighborhood of 30,000+ pictures, and it embraces all 50 states. Scoping out the lay of the land and ‘the hand of man’ -- and what may have been wrought in places where each overlay: the fruit of enterprise, and, the sullied tumult. Evidence of the land we are on and the world we find ourselves in; where we are at and who we are; what we have done; and, where we can go.
TWFS is subsumed by a life-long concern with the nature of Place and placement in Nature. Its photographs examine the manifold ambient and manifest characteristics that define and crystallize the identity of American places; they plumb, depict, document, and clearly view the nature and the temper of American regions.
Portraits.
An overall catalogue of other projects:
- Along the Mississippi: Observing a metaphysical landscape, #1: piecing together the routes, river infrastructure, and industrial and railroad topography that hug the banks of the river from Minneapolis to St. Paul; very new and uncertain terrain for me at the time. [1975]
- Scans of Greenland and Iceland: Observing a metaphysical landscape, #2: my first comprehensive foray to explore Polar Regions, in particular the realms settled by the medieval Norse.[1976]
- The Heart of Illinois: Observing a metaphysical landscape, #3: a meditative and poetic photographic pulse-taking of one very limited rural locale deep in the American Heartland. [1978]
- Anasazi Places: the ruins of the Anasazi people in N. M., Ariz., and Colo., and the pueblos of their inheritors; the sacred lands of the Hopi and Navajo across the American Southwest – a NEH-supported project organized and directed by Evan Maurer. [1980]
- High Energy, Fusion, and Space: an expansive and complexly-phased body of work looking at the research laboratories and installations of high energy and particle physics, astronomy, fusion, and space exploration: Fermilab, SLAC, Kennedy Space Center, the VLA and Arecibo radio telescopes, Jet Propulsion and Livermore Labs; my art, as I see it, is subsumed by the passions, mysteries, and constructs of science. [1980-83]
- Graves and Memorials. 1914 1918: a vast inventory of the cemeteries and memorials of The Great War on the Western Front in France and Belgium – Klipper was driven to immerse him self and my soul in the grim residue of the signal event that determined the nature of the era in which he would be living out his life. [1984]
- From Emptiness: the bare and stark deserts of the Biblical Holy Land in Egypt and Israel: the Sinai, the Negev, and the Judean Wilderness – geology as theology; plus the sacred sites of Judaism, Christianity and Islam; a personal religious inquiry – hid ‘going out into the desert wilderness’. [1985]
-Portents in the North: Radiation in Lapland: a comprehensive scrutiny of the terrain of Sweden and Norway irradiated by the Chernobyl catastrophe fallout – he felt had to be in this damaged place, one that might stand as a bellwether for yet worse; and, to be amidst the Sámi whose culture was sorely bruised; radiation maps acted as guides. [1988]
- In the Rain Forest: The Specifications of Life, photographs made deep inside the rain forest preserves of Costa Rica; these forests are essential to planetary health and threatened everywhere; he wanted to ‘swim’ in the densest soup of DNA anywhere. [1989]
- Talking to Heidegger: a protracted inter-related series of b/w photographs of both the common and enigmatic constituents of the world on hand as passed by. [1985 - 1989]
- Along the Songlines: a peripatetic transect of the Top End of Australia; the Outback, the sacred places of the Aboriginal tribes – rounding out a triad of holy land work. [1996]
- Liguria; as a Fellow of the Bogliasco Fountain; Klipper needed to take a break to head off on an unexpected and quixotic tangent; to go to the sort of place his more ‘normal’ friends went to; for once sybaritic surrounds instead of doing my normative ‘hardship duty’. [2003]
- Parkchester: two returns to the Bronx neighborhood of his youth—after over 3 decades of absence; mapping out the world he first knew, where his identity was first forged – this, finally, after having had carefully looked at the home places of so many others, this evocative attempt to look at my own. [2003, 2005]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Klipper
