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Award-Winning Artist and Highland Park native, Donald Lipski will discuss his process of creating large-scale public art installations.

Donald Lipski was born in Chicago in 1947 and grew up in Highland Park, graduating HPHS in 1965.

Donald started sculpting in high school under the tutelage of Nick Prokos and Scotty Walker, which as a senior earned him a Scholastic Art Award. He studied American History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (B.A., 1970), and Ceramics at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan (M.F.A., 1973). He taught at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, and at Cooper Union in New York, and has lectured at more than 100 colleges, universities, art schools and museums. He has lived his adult life in New York City, Sag Harbor, NY, and Philadelphia, with a year each in Houston, TX, San Francisco, CA and Rome, Italy. His time now is split between New York City and Amagansett, NY.

Lipski is known for his poetic combining and altering of existing things, for his enigmatic installation works and for his many public artworks. Since coming to prominence with his MoMA exhibition in 1979, his work has been shown in galleries and museums around the world. He is represented in the permanent collections of dozens of museums, including at the Chicago Art Institute, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Milwaukee Art Museum. He’s had numerous exhibitions in Chicago including at the MCA, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Chicago Arts Club and many shows with the Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

In recent years he has created dozens of prominent and compelling public sculptures. These have been both overwhelmingly popular with the general public and garnered critical acclaim. They have been repeatedly cited by Americans for the Arts and Art in America as among the “Best Public Art of the Year”. These inventive and ground-breaking works for airports, schools, libraries, hospitals, sports stadiums and other public sites have become icons and touchstones for their communities, and “must-see” experiences for visitors.

His many awards include The Guggenheim Fellowship, three National Endowment for the Arts Awards and The Rome Prize of the American Academy in Rome. He was honored a few years ago as an HPHS Distinguished Alumni, proudly joining the ranks of such HP luminaries as Gen. Stansfield Turner, actor Gary Sinise, peace activist Karen Nussbaum, novelist William Goldman and astronaut John Grunsfeld.