Beth Lipman on Glass, Abundance, and What We Leave Behind

What can a table of glass fruit tell someone excavating our civilization a thousand years from now? And what happens to art — and to us — when the tangible world starts losing to the virtual one?In this episode, host Hugh Leeman sits down with Beth Lipman — an acclaimed artist known for her monumental, often ghostly still lifes rendered in glass — for a wide-ranging conversation about material culture, memory, and what gets left behind.Lipman traces her path into the still life tradition "through the back door," from a childhood among craft fairs and folk-art books in Pennsylvania Dutch country to her first intentional engagement with the genre at the Brooklyn Museum. She explains why she deliberately keeps the smartphone — and any marker of new technology — out of her sculptures, and how her ethical restraint around cultural appropriation shapes what she will and won't put on the table. She reflects on the piece in the Jewish Museum's permanent collection that became unexpectedly autobiographical, her first permanent outdoor work Hive Mind at Iowa State, and the idea of anxiety, or "perseverating," as an artistic tool.The conversation opens into the biggest questions of the moment: the digital revolution's effect on human consciousness, the possibility of a coming backfire against AI and misinformation, the fragility of the systems we depend on, and why she believes making anything at all is a radical, political act. It closes on the double — two sides of the coin, truth and untruth — the theme she thinks may carry her work for years to come.