Chip Lord

Chip Lord grew up in 1950’s America, a place that has been a sometimes source of inspiration in his work as an artist. Trained as an architect, he was a founding partner of Ant Farm, with whom he produced the video art classics Media Burn and The Eternal Frame as well as the public sculpture, Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo Texas, and the House of the Century, outside Houston.

His work crosses documentary and experimental boundaries and moves between video, photography and installation. He often collaborates with other artists.  Ant Farm Media Van v.08 [Time Capsule],  a collaboration with Curtis Schreier and Bruce Tomb, revisits Ant Farm’s 1970 Media Van and brings it into the 21st Century.  The installation posits a “post-internal combustion vehicle’ as a space for networking around a “Media Huqquh” and in the process creates a digital time capsule.  An abiding interest in the complex culture of transportation systems inspired The Executive Air Traveler, 1980, a photo series;  Airspaces, 2000 – 2011 and To & From LAX, a public video installation.  Lord authored Automerica for E.P. Dutton (1976) and the car as subject also “drives” MOTORIST, Road Movie, and The New Cars, 2012. His lecture The Long Goodbye to the Automobile integrates seven projects and speaks to the future.

Chip Lord’s work has been exhibited and published widely and is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Tate Modern, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the FRAC Centre, the Pompidou Centre, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Film & Digital Media, U.C. Santa Cruz, and has also taught in Architecture at CCA and Columbia University GSAPP. He lives in San Francisco.