COA Kippy Stroud Memorial Lecture
Press release
BAR HARBOR—Artist and photographer Pia Paulina Guilmoth presents the 2025 College of the Atlantic Kippy Stroud Memorial Lecture on Friday, May 16, at 6:30 p.m. in the Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Community Center. The talk is free and open to the public.
The College of the Atlantic arts and design faculty are pleased to welcome Guilmoth, who lives and makes art in rural Maine. She is a working-class, transgender woman who lives with her girlfriend and two cats in a small space inside of an old factory. In her free time she likes to lay in the dirt, shoot guns, hold her friends, and trespass into abandoned houses and barns.
Guilmoth’s work is foremost about harnessing beauty as a form of resistance to a world full of terrors. While making art she is thinking about class, gender, euphoria, dysphoria and whatever else is happening in her life at that given moment.
“In a world often too hurried to pause and observe, Pia Paulina Guilmoth offers us a profound gift, the chance to truly see,” says Alessia Glaviano in Photo Vogue.
Guilmoth released her third book in November 2024 with Stanley/Barker titled Flowers Drink the River, with her first major solo exhibition with Webber Gallery in London upon its release. She was a 2022 Macdowell Fellow in Visual Arts, and is a 2024 winner of the Google/Aperture Creator Labs and the Peter Reed Foundation grant. She has another solo exhibition opening in Italy at Studio Faganel in spring of 2025.
Marion Boulton “Kippy” Stroud was a talented artist, teacher, generous philanthropist, and impassioned promoter of contemporary art and artists. Starting in 1977, she founded, funded, and directed The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, an experimental program for artists working in textiles and many other media. She oversaw and funded the Acadia Summer Arts Program, affectionately known as “Kamp Kippy,” on Mount Desert Island, where she spent summers throughout her life. For almost three decades Kamp Kippy hosted hundreds of artists with their guests and families.