Stephanie Crawford and Meg Lipke

Rebecca Camacho Presents is pleased to announce a dual exhibition of new works by painters Stephanie Crawford and Meg Lipke. Complimentary in fluidity of form and color, the true symbiosis between the artists comes from their non-conformity of practice; Crawford and Lipke create outside of standardized norms.

Stephanie Crawford (b. 1942) is a transgender visual artist and celebrated jazz vocalist. Born and raised in Detroit, Crawford was an early participant in gender reassignment surgery in the late 1960s. She moved to Manhattan at age 36 after receiving a scholarship to pursue her MFA at Pratt Institute and became a fixture in the 1980s Downtown New York performance scene, bridging the worlds of blues and drag. From 1989 to 1996, Crawford taught jazz vocals in Paris and received the prestigious award ‘Django D’Or’ for Best International Jazz Vocalist in 1993. Throughout her years of public life as a performing artist, Crawford remained committed to her solitary painting and drawing practice. She paints from observation, moving freely between representation and abstraction, her deliberate marks pool and bleed color across the surface of the page in an uncontrollable process akin to the improvisations of jazz. Crawford’s life - her transformations and evolutions, always becoming more authentic and honest versions of herself - is its own artwork. Her vibrant, ethereal, lush and luminous paintings translate her world and experience into the tangible.

Born in Portland OR and raised in Burlington VT, Meg Lipke (b. 1969) spent summers in Manchester England where her family ran a woolen mill. Rooted in inherited craft traditions, Lipke augments conventional notions of painting with her colorful, three-dimensional canvas abstractions. Moving beyond the constraints of a geometric format, Lipke’s polyester filled fabric compositions, stuffed yet pliable, animate and poised, are dauntlessly future forward. Presented as wall-reliefs, ranging in scale from intimate to monumental, saturated in washy color and intricate, detailed patterning, the works engage with familiarity. Lipke’s tangible imagery is relatable, referential to aspects of the body or encountered objects. Her ability to link these understood entities with a larger conceptual dialogue is layered in intellect and humor. As Tom McGlynn wrote in a Brooklyn Rail review, January 2021, “An unavoidable subtext to Lipke’s approach to painting is her questioning of how far art-making might function as a fetishized ritual, and to what extent pattern and decoration combined with quirky sculptural form can avoid such slips into offhand incantation. … ‘Consider playing with your aesthetic presumptions,’ Lipke seems to suggest. Far from being obsequious, this mode of address constitutes one of the most subversive aspects of the show, as good humor can disarm the world-weary critic at large in us all.”

Meg Lipke received her MFA from Cornell University in 1996 and has exhibited consistently since that time. From 2005 through 2016 Lipke and her husband owned and operated the acclaimed Northeast Kingdom, a seasonal farm to table restaurant in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn NY. Lipke was most recently highlighted in a mid-career focus exhibition, In the Making: A Five Year Survey, on view at the Burlington City Arts Center from February to May 2021.

In support of the exhibition, Stephanie Crawford will engage in a public zoom dialogue with Zackary Drucker on Thursday 18 November at 3pm PST. Zackary Drucker is an independent artist, cultural producer, and trans woman who breaks down the way we think about gender, sexuality, and seeing. She has performed and exhibited her work internationally in museums, galleries, and film festivals including the Whitney Biennial 2014, MoMA PS1, Hammer Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, MCA San Diego, and SF MoMA, among others. Drucker is an Emmy-nominated Producer for the docu-series This Is Me, as well as a Producer on Golden Globe and Emmy-winning Transparent.