A Cool Customer in a High-Stakes Art Field

During the summers, which the artists Donald Lipski and Terry Hyland spend at their house in the Amagansett dunes, his studio consists of a desk and computer inside a tent. It’s a far cry from his old workspace in Greenpoint, a former movie theater and factory. “I had 3,000 feet of metal shelving there,” Mr. Lipski said during a recent conversation on his patio.

That was when he stockpiled materials found on the streets near his loft on Greenwich and Canal Streets. “I would pass Dumpsters that were full of stuff from some factory or warehouse that was closing. I started taking the stuff up to my loft and making things that  were fed by those materials.” 

His stockpiling days are over now that he works almost exclusively on public art projects. “I still make things,” he said, “but not very much. Most of my work is fabricated.” He likes being able to operate on the large scale offered by public projects and welcomes the challenge. “Working with objects never got boring, but it got easy. In public art, there’s a situation, and it’s sort of unique, and the only real given is you’ve got a budget.”

Over the past 20 years, he has created more than 25 public artworks throughout the United States and has eight in progress, including one in Calgary and one in Honolulu. No two look alike. What links them is not appearance or style but his way of approaching each situation, which is to let his mind wander freely over the specifics of the site, its purpose, and its history. “I can propose anything that comes into my mind.”

One project is in the works for Penn Treaty Park, where William Penn signed his treaty of peace in 1683 with the local Lenape tribe just off the Delaware River north of the center of Philadelphia. The park will be reached by a pedestrian underpass beneath I-95. 

Mr. Lipski discovered that the Lenape have three clans: the turkey clan, the wolf clan, and the turtle clan. To illuminate the path to the park, which passes through a derelict area, he will place two tall lights just west of the underpass. A monumental turkey will be atop one, a wolf atop the other. On the other side of the highway will be a row of lamps rising from the backs of turtles. 

Animals have figured in a number of his projects. A school of 25 fiberglass sunfish, each seven feet long and lit from within at night, are suspended over the San Antonio River Walk. For another installation in a vast convention center, three flocks of big birds fly toward an eight-foot-diameter acrylic nest, each with a piece of acrylic in its beak.

“The Yearling,” originally sponsored by the Public Art Fund of New York and now situated on the mall outside the Denver Public Library, consists of a life-size fiberglass horse looking out from the seat of a red 20-foot-tall steel replica of a child’s chair.

In 2009 Mr. Lipski was commissioned to build a piece for the Cleveland Indians’ spring training ballpark in Arizona. His first thought was a feather made out of baseball bats. During the process he met with some Native Americans in Phoenix and learned that the feather is a holy object that should never touch the ground. “I decided I’d put a feather on a pedestal. The committee loved the idea, but the team shot it down.”

The final piece, titled “The Ziz,” is a fiberglass, concrete, and steel recreation of Brancusi’s “Bird in Space,” but white, with stitching like that on a baseball. It is 60 feet 6 inches tall, the distance from a pitcher’s mound to home plate. “The Ziz” is typical of Mr. Lipski’s work in that it operates elegantly on both conceptual and material levels and with a witty repurposing of elements, in this case a baseball and Brancusi’s sculpture, into something unlike either one.

Mr. Lipski was born in Chicago and raised in the suburb of Highland Park. He made art in high school, and he won a Scholastic Art Award in 1965 for “Bird of Prey,” which he welded from steel rods. 

At the University of Wisconsin, he became “a child of the ’60s,” living on a farm and more active in antiwar protests than class work. “I flunked all my courses my sophomore year, including a sculpture course, but I got very good at bridge.”

During his senior year, he studied woodworking and ceramics and decided to become either a furniture maker or a potter. When he visited Denmark and explored the former option, he learned “you start an apprenticeship by sanding for a couple of years. It wasn’t for me.”

After a brief stint as a graduate student at the University of Colorado, he went to the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he studied ceramics and first experienced being around artists. “Most were very much isolated in their departments, but I was all over the school, doing everything.” When he graduated, he found a job teaching sculpture and ceramics at the University of Oklahoma.

During the course of his four years there, he started a student-run arts club that brought to the campus as visiting artists such prominent art world figures as Carl Andre, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, William Wegman, and John Baldessari. “But after four years, the bloom was off, and I decided to move to New York in 1978.”

Mr. Lipski had a solo show that same year at Artists Space, one of the first and most important nonprofit exhibition venues for emerging artists. That installation, “Gathering Dust,” consisted of pocket-sized sculptures he had been making since he was a child that were affixed to the walls throughout the gallery. The piece was installed at the Museum of Modern Art the following year as one of its Projects exhibitions.

Of “Gathering Dust,” he said, “Thanks to Baldessari, who was such a hero of mine, I began to realize what those modest little sculptures had to do with art is that they were art. I had and still have a deep belief in that work because it’s so elemental, so unaffected by any sophisticated ideas of art.”

In 1981, after having shown the piece at MoMA and elsewhere around the country, “I felt I had made my great statement and I was going to be like Newton, who, at 25, had had all his best ideas. I was sort of depressed. I made a plan to build a staircase in the forest that would start at the forest floor and go up until it was above the trees. It would be like a knife going through the woods.”

That idea morphed into “Progress,” a wooden stairway built at Battery Park in New York City. The original idea called for ropes with flags on them to run from the stairway to the top of World Trade Center. “I had an engineer, and we figured out how to do it. I bought two half-mile lengths of rope. When I made my presentation, there were people from aviation, from risk management, from about a dozen different agencies. Needless to say, I was shot down, but I loved the piece as it was.”

In 1987, mutual friends fixed up Mr. Lipski and Ms. Hyland. They were married in 1989 and bought the house in Amagansett that same year. They also owned a house in Sag Harbor for 10 years that they rented out every summer to pay for the beach house. Their son, Jackson Hyland-Lipski, who was born in 1992, will become director of special projects for Women’s March Global in the fall.

For an artist with so many irons in so many fires at any given time, Mr. Lipski remains surprisingly unflappable, a captivating raconteur who talks about each project with the same clarity and wit found in the artworks themselves.