A Celebration of Micki Lippe’s Career at BIMA

A Celebration of Micki Lippe’s Career at BIMA

Article by Susan Kunimatsu

Photos by Dana Cassara

On the afternoon of Saturday April 8, jewelry artists and SMG members Micki Lippe and Andy Cooperman met onstage in the auditorium of the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art for a conversation moderated by curator Greg Robinson. This was the last of three events put on by the museum to celebrate the career retrospective exhibition “Micki Lippe: Loosely Hinged.”

Micki introduced herself with a brief history in images of her five-plus decades making jewelry. Then she and Andy settled in for a wide-ranging discussion of their lives as artists, a conversation animated by their long friendship and shared experience of the history of art jewelry in the Pacific Northwest. As founding members of the Seattle Metals Guild and the planning committee for the first Northwest Jewelry/Metals Symposium, they knew pioneering figures like Ramona Solberg and Flora Book. They paid tribute to seminal artists and educators, Mary Lee Hu, John Marshall and Roger Horner, and lamented the loss of the illustrious metals program at the University of Washington. They offered perspective on making a living as an artist and how the field has changed, for better and worse, during their careers. Their conversation was informative and knowledgeable, witty and deeply personal.

“Micki Lippe: Loosely Hinged” continues at BIMA through June 4. Including literally the first and last pieces of jewelry that Micki made, the exhibition surveys the aesthetics and inspirations that marked the phases of her career as a maker.

A recording of this conversation is available.