Sculptor Lipski finds metaphor, meaning in materials

Donald Lipski conned his way into a pair of UW–Madison art courses in his senior year, and his gambit blossomed into an internationally acclaimed art career.

Lipski, whose 48-foot-tall sculpture “Nail’s Tales” will be installed near Camp Randall Stadium this week, came to UW–Madison as a business major in 1965, hoping to follow his father into the bicycle business, but later switched his major to American Institutions.

As a senior, the Highland Park, Ill. native wanted to take a woodworking course and a ceramics course. Lacking the prerequisites, he simply registered for the courses, claiming he had the needed background. And a career took flight.

“I wasn’t an art major, so I had to lie to get in. Those courses changed my life,” Lipski says. “In particular, I had a ceramics teacher named Don Reitz who is a legend in the ceramics world and a great mentor. Everything he does – if it’s spreading butter on a piece of bread, he’s totally into the aesthetics of it.”

The experience convinced Lipski that art was his passion, and he went on to earn a master of fine arts at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., in 1973. After graduation, Lipski taught art at the University of Oklahoma for four years.

From there, Lipski went to New York “to step out into the sunshine to see if I’d cast a shadow.”

Within the first year, he had a show at Artists’ Space, an alternative gallery for young artists. That show caught the eye of curators at the Museum of Modern Art, who invited him to hold an exhibition there.

“Basically, I’m a three-dimensional person,” Lipski says. “I’ve spent most of my career taking objects and putting them together in ways that are poetic or expressive.”

Lipski’s work has been shown in galleries throughout the United States and Europe and, beginning in 1997, he began to take on larger, public art commissions across the country.

One of his proudest creations is “Sirshasana,” which is displayed in New York City’s Grand Central Terminal. The sculpture takes the form of an inverted olive tree whose branches stretch some 25 feet, and are adorned by thousands of leaded Austrian chandelier crystals.

“More than 250,000 people pass through the terminal every day, and you can see the sculpture through the windows along Lexington Avenue,” he says.

Lipski has also done pieces for the Miami International Airport, the Washington, D.C. Convention Center, the Wellington Webb Municipal Building in Denver, the Avenue of the Arts in Kansas City, and for a rotating exhibit in New York’s Central Park.

“It’s interesting having work that – instead of being for the educated, somewhat rarefied audience that goes to galleries and museums – is intended to seduce the casual passerby,” Lipski says. “The idea is to make something that is going to be acceptable to the public, but will still challenge people.”

Public art, of course, can be a source of debate. That’s something that Lipski welcomes and he notes that some of the world’s most revered artwork was once disparaged.

“People hated the Eiffel Tower when it went up. They thought it was brutal and completely out of scale with the landscape. Now, imagine Paris without it,” Lipski says.

Lipski’s work embraces a far-flung range of materials and inspirations. From subway tokens applied to park benches to spoons welded to a cast iron buoy, Lipski’s work is often marked by surprising juxtapositions.

“I see objects that are beautiful or suggestive or intriguing to me and they become the basis for the art I make,” he says. “The world is so full of things that feed into my consciousness.”