BFD: Birmingham Fire Department, Big Fucking Deal Collage

I'm a Detroit-born artist based in Los Angeles, CA. My work explores America’s Mid-century culture using comic books, historical journalism, and artifacts of the era. ARTIST STATEMENT My work examines America’s mid-century culture and how history tends to repeat itself. It focuses on persistent issues like inequality, discrimination, violence, and societal morals. I’m driven by a desire to understand why we continue to make the same mistakes, and my art seeks to answer that question. ARTIST BIO Julie Lipa, a self-taught artist from Detroit, channels her fascination with discarded objects into her art— a passion ignited by garbage picking with her parents. Her creative path was further shaped by an influential electro-kinetic teacher at Macomb County Community College, who taught her to see the world differently. Early on, Lipa repurposed 1950s portable TVs into functional art. But ultimately she needed to make the rent so she stopped making art and founded an entertainment marketing agency. Two decades later she retired and returned to her art, using the vintage TVs she had stored to create her solo show Beneath Perfection: The Underside of America’s Mid-Century Belle Époque, a journalistic exploration of American history. Her latest series, Pulp Fission: Classic Comics Reconstructed, deconstructs the violent, sexist comic panels of the 1950s, exposing their false moral narratives while infusing them with subversive, queer, and risqué themes that challenge America's sanitized history. Her work can be found at the Smithsonian Affiliate The Atomic Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada and in private collections.