For painter Meg Lipke ’91, UVM was both her childhood home and the birthplace of her earliest creative instincts. “My brother (Dan Lipke ’95) and I were the quintessential faculty brats,” says Lipke, whose father taught art history at UVM and mother taught art history and studio art across the street at Trinity College. Now a full-time artist in the Hudson Valley, Lipke is still evolving in her approach to painting. Her large-form abstract pieces defy conventional notions of the medium. Rather than starting with a stretched, flat canvas, Lipke crafts her own multi-dimensional canvas supports that lend a sculptural element to her work.   

“We usually think about a painting as being flat, but I really wanted to reinvigorate painting and bring some of the confrontation that first-wave feminists brought to their work, in which they were engaging new forms, trying to break out of older, fixed disciplines like painting or sculpture and creating new hybrid forms that didn’t have a history of being male-dominated.” 

In the spring of 2021, with support from the Mollie Ruprecht Fund for Visual Arts, Associate Professor Steve Budington invited Lipke to return to UVM virtually to share wisdom and advice with two art and painting classes. She encouraged students to experiment fearlessly and find their own voice in their work.  

“The visual arts can all be used to express, ‘I was here, and this is how I felt joy’ or ‘This is how I felt about life.’ And I think that’s just so basic and human. It’s how we communicate with each other in a visual or sensory language that doesn’t require words. There are so many different ways of understanding each other, other cultures, other times and histories and voices. It makes us richer and more empathic as a society to engage and practice the arts.”