Stuart Klipper

Stuart David Klipper (born 1941 in the Bronx) is an American photographer based in Minneapolis. Best known for his panoramic landscape shots, Klipper has visited Antarctica six times between 1976 and 2009, five of which were as part of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. He is a two-time Guggenheim Fellowship winner (1979, 1989) and a three-time National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists' fellow (1976, 1979, 1981). He is one of a few hundred people who have stood at both the North and South Poles.

Early life

Klipper was born in the Bronx, New York City in 1941. His father was an accountant whose family emigrated from Lithuania, and his Brooklyn-born mother was Galician. The family was reform but attended a conservative synagogue. Klipper became interested in photography early in life, in part due to his father's dedication to documenting their childhood in photos. He was part of the photography club in school and bought his "first real camera," a Rolleicord, with his Bar Mitzvah money.

Klipper attended the University of Michigan, initially intending to study engineering. He graduated with a degree in psychology in 1962. He took photography classes there after finishing his degree.

Career

Klipper left for Stockholm in 1965 and returned to the US a year later with a "Swedish sweetheart" and settled in Brooklyn Heights. In 1970, he joined the faculty of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design as a photography teacher. He also teaches a photography course at Colorado College. In 1983, he won a contest held by the Minneapolis Arts Commission to design one of eight manhole covers in downtown Minneapolis.

Klipper is well-known for his panoramics of the Antarctic and, as of 2018, has visited six times. He went to the Arctic for the first time in 1976 on a Sierra Club expedition. He has been part of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Antarctic Artists and Writers Program since 1987. In 1989, he was based at McMurdo Station and, in 1992, he traveled aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer. His most recent trip with the NSF was in 1999. In July 2009, he visited the North Pole, making him one of approximately 400 people to have stood at both the North and South Poles. He has also worked in Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard, and the area of Lapland irradiated by the Chernobyl disaster.

He has also photographed in a range of warmer climates, including the deserts of Israel and Sinai, Costa Rica, Australia, Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan. In 1982, he was part of a group exhibition called Anasazi Places. The Being of Place: The Presence of Time at Drake University of Anasazi architecture and ruins. In 1985, he had a solo exhibition entitled Graves and Memorials 1914 to 1918 of World War I memorials and gravesites on the Western Front. Using a grant from the Jerome Foundation, he traveled to Rome in 2002 to photograph churches and antiquities. His work has been published in several magazines, including Harper's, Newsweek, and Aperature. In 2008, he published the book The Antarctic: From the Circle to the Pole through Chronicle Books about his time in Antarctica. Over the course of his career, he has hosted talks, lectures, photography competition, exhibitions, and workshops across the United States, and has been volunteering for decades at a local elementary school, teaching photography to kids in first through fifth grades.

Klipper's photographs have been exhibited in and collected by museums in the US and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Walker Art Center, Jewish Museum, the Moderna Museet, Israel Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, Fotogalleriet in Oslo, US Embassy in Santiago, Canterbury Museum, and Bonn Kunsthalle in Bonn, Switzerland.^{[citation needed]} He has been commissioned by the states of Texas and Minnesota, Cray Research Corp., First Bank System, Valspar, University of Minnesota, and Medtronics Corp.^{[citation needed]}

Grants, honors, and fellowships

• Minnesota State Arts Board Grant (1974)
• Minnesota State Arts Board Grant (1976)
• National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists' Fellowship (1976/1977)
• John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1979)
• National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists' Fellowship (1979/1980)
• Bush Foundation Fellowship (1980)
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (1981)^{[citation needed]}
• McKnight Foundation Photography Fellowship (1985)
• McKnight Foundation Photography Fellowship (1987)
• NSF Antarctic Artists and Writers Program (1989)
• John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1989)
• Antarctica Service Medal (1989)
• NSF Antarctic Artists and Writers Program (1992)
• Minnesota State Arts Board Grant (1992)
• NSF Antarctic Artists and Writers Program (1994)
• Bush Foundation Fellowship (1995)
• NSF Antarctic Artists and Writers Program (1999)
• Jerome Foundation (2003)
• Bogliasco Foundation (2003)
• Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2019/2020)
• McKnight Foundation Photography Fellowship (unknown date)

Selected exhibitions

External links

• Official Website

Sources