Alice Tippit

Alice Tippit (b. 1975, Independence, KS) is an American painter who lives and works in Chicago, IL. Across her vibrant, hard-edged oil paintings, Tippit adopts colour, shape, and form as avenues for metaphor and meaning. With graphic simplicity, she complicates familiar symbols—such as household objects, animals, and body parts—to tease out the erotic, playful, or even gruesome undertones beneath established archetypes. Immediately recognisable, the artist’s choice of images interrogates and challenges the patriarchal systems from which our collective perceptions emerge. 

The optical puzzles and provocative innuendos encoded in her sparse paintings hinge on rigorous experimentations with linguistics and semiotics. Embracing ambiguity and contradiction, Tippit invites viewers to consider the myriad ways in which we construct meaning through language and form as well as the coexistence of multiple interpretations. Holding BFA and MFA degrees in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the artist was a Finalist for the 2019 Artadia Award in Chicago. She has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Patron Gallery, Chicago in 2024 and Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels and Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York in 2023. In 2021, she was featured in a group institutional exhibition which traveled from the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, Ohio to the Kemper Museum of Contemporary in Kansas City, Missouri. Her first institutional solo exhibition will be mounted in 2026 by the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago.