Julie Lipa

Growing up in Detroit, Julie Lipa spent her early years garbage-picking in the city’s alleys. In her late teens, she found her first dozen vintage TVs curbside and carried them around for decades as she moved across the country. The effort ultimately paid off.

Shearing the faces off the TVs provided the beginnings of her self-taught entry into creating up-cycled Mid-Century Modern Mixed Media artworks. By adding a picture in the TV screen, photo transfer collage and a disproportionately sized, often sinister, 1950s spokesmodel coated in resin, she found her own way to tell the stories of the period.

Julie’s pieces are historical documentations of disparate stories from America's mid-century era. From a distance, the choice of bold colors and energetic images presents a colorful arrangement of sky, horizon and ground to draw the viewer in. But a closer look at the collage, composed of historic journalism and other pop imagery, reveals stories of hypocrisy in mid-century consumerism, sexism, racism, motherhood, atomic bombs and flying the friendly skies.

It’s a pretty picture that is not a pretty picture.

ARTIST STATEMENT ABOUT THE SERIES: 

“The appliance/spokesmodel/journalism formula I use today was developed thanks to technology that didn't exist back when I started thirty years ago.  I discovered an online archive of newspapers that would provide my work with endless high-resolution advertisements, while introducing me to articles about events from the 1940s to 1960s. These, combined with my affection for mid-century design and style, have allowed me to delve deep into the darker side of the “good old days.”