Lippincott's career belongs to the small generation of American women modernists who came up through the war and the GI Bill and built their working lives in the unconventional setting of postwar New Mexico, a generation whose abstract painting belongs to the broader story of American Abstract Expressionism but is rooted in the particular light and culture of the Southwest.
Lippincott's path into modernism began in her childhood. Her father's business work took the family to Paris during her early years, and her exposure to the European avant-garde during that period seeded an interest in modernist painting that her mother encouraged with formal art classes from the age of fifteen. The early Manhattan training gave her a strong foundation in drawing and composition before she had committed fully to abstraction.
The war reshaped her life. Her wartime service in London exposed her to a building collapse during the Blitz, a serious back injury that she carried through the rest of her life. The combination of the wartime experience and the recovery period that followed produced a sharper and more deliberate sense of artistic purpose, and her decision to use her GI Bill funding for serious art training was the start of her mature career.
The decisive period of her formation was her years at the Bisttram school in Taos. Bisttram's teaching gave her a non-objective vocabulary rooted in Theosophical and Kandinsky-influenced abstraction, and her work with Morang, whose painting and criticism were central to the modernist circle around Santa Fe and Taos, deepened her sense of the larger New Mexican modernist community in which she would soon become a working member.
By the mid-1950s she was settled in Santa Fe and producing the body of work, abstract paintings, prints, and drawings of remarkable range, for which she is now best known. She could match the gestural energy of the leading New York Abstract Expressionists when she chose to, but her practice also extended into softer, nature-inspired abstractions, color-field-related paintings, and figurative works, and the breadth of her output is one of the distinctive features of her career. Her assertive, articulate position on the seriousness of abstract painting helped to push the local Santa Fe scene toward a more rigorous engagement with mid-century American modernism.
Her later decades produced a steady stream of exhibitions, awards, and collections placements within the regional and national art world. Her position today is that of a senior figure in the postwar New Mexico modernist tradition, an artist whose career runs in close parallel to the larger story of American abstract painting and whose work has been actively reassessed in the years since her death, most concretely through the body of work and archive she left to St. John's College in Santa Fe.