Tod Lippy: My Fellow Americans

For Independent 2025, The Meeting is pleased to present Tod Lippy’s My Fellow Americans, a single work comprising a series of small portraits of Trump voters. Lippy’s title quotes President Nixon’s famous introduction to his address to the “silent majority,” promoting his pro-war policy in Vietnam in the face of a nation that had been torn asunder.

Lippy says: “I googled the phrase ‘Why I voted for Trump’ and over the course of several days found 50 people who had publicly proclaimed their support, either in interviews with media outlets or in op-eds they had written for national and regional newspapers. I decided that I would paint portraits of each of these voters.”

Lippy mixes the conceptual with the documentary—he uses the chance and randomness of Google searches to develop a snapshot of the Trump constituency. His inquiry peers across the political divide: he enters the other’s political bubble, putting a face to those in the movement he opposes. Infusing himself into the closed circuits of self-actualization that LinkedIn and Facebook sustain, he figures an alternate universe that’s more than familiar.

My Fellow Americans saw Lippy pick up brush and paint for the first time with the skillful results of a bold enthusiast. Each face beams with the truth—albeit an unverifiable one—that portrait painting bestows upon its subject.

He channels Alex Katz’s flatness and attenuation of affect, giving his subjects, despite their diverse looks, a visual if not psychic repetition. One that echoes what cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer saw in 1920s American popular culture: the surface display of a “mass ornament.”

Yet Lippy’s project holds ambiguity close to its heart. Is the artist—in acrylic gouache, wax crayon, colored pencil, graphite, Sharpie, and paint pen on board—humanizing his subjects, the political force they form, and, ultimately, the man they placed at the country’s helm? Or is he indicting them, calling out their misplaced sense of duty? Giving them a relatable banality that Hannah Arendt may have called a pragmatic amorality?—John Thomson

About Tod Lippy
Tod Lippy (b. 1963, Baltimore, MD) works across a range of disciplines, including curation, design, music, publishing, and writing, to reckon with the complexities of a fractured culture. He holds an MA in Art History from Williams College and an MA in Cinema Studies from New York University. Solo exhibitions include My Fellow Americans, The Meeting pop-up, Los Angeles, CA (2025); Private, The Meeting, New York, NY (2024); and Private, The Future Perfect, Los Angeles, CA (2024). Lippy is the creator of the arts publication Esopus (2003–2018), which has been the subject of exhibitions at the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, ME (2024); the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX (2017); and de Appel Art Center, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2016), and which has been featured in group shows at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Rome’s Contemporary Arts Center; and the Casino Luxembourg. Lippy was awarded a MacDowell Colony Fellowship in 2018. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. 

About The Meeting
The Meeting was founded in 2016 by Bill Cournoyer and is based in the West Village neighborhood of New York City. Its mission is to present a multi-generational and international program of contemporary artists. Its name references the painting The Meeting, Or Bonjour Monsieur by Gustave Courbet, a masterpiece that depicts an encounter between the artist and his patron, and which defines the synergetic relationship between them. The gallery has presented the debut solo exhibitions of Andy Bennett, Nick Hoecker, Samuel Farrier, and Tod Lippy, as well as the first New York solo exhibitions of Andrew Chapman, Buck Ellison, Christopher Culver, Henry Belden, Hongyan, Jack Ryan, and Patrick Carroll. Its current exhibition, wiming, features paintings by Janine Iverson.