From GI to MFA: Clayton Rippey's Explorations in Abstraction
June 17 - September 27, 2025
In late 1944, while serving in the U.S. Army, a young man from Oregon named Clayton Rippey wrote a letter to his mother, Inez. Enclosed were instructions for her to send $150 of his bond money to Marcia Sanford, Clayton’s high school sweetheart, so that she might pick out an engagement ring. Although the Rippeys’ romance began before the War, their letter-writing relationship in many ways mirrors the main characters’ in Dear Jack, Dear Louise, a play about a WWII epistolary courtship featured in Utah Shakespeare Festival’s 2025 season. Like the stage production, this exhibition is, in part, a celebration of a love that survived the distance and dangers of deployment, and the art it ultimately enabled.
Like many GIs of his generation, Clayton Rippey’s education was first interrupted by the draft and then facilitated by the GI Bill. Following the war, he graduated with a BA followed by an MFA from Stanford, and then began a long career teaching at Bakersfield College in southern California. A prolific artist who worked across media, Rippey’s body of work is a diverse exploration of color, form, and subject matter. This exhibition brings together artifacts from his life and military service, alongside a selection of his paintings and mixed-material mosaics, which are all executed in Rippey’s unique abstract style, both figurative and geometric.
Artwork Credit:
Clayton Rippey (U.S., 1923 - 2021)
This is the Only Way, n.d.
Mixed media collage on paper, 22 x 28 in.
Gift of the Rippey Family (2021), Southern Utah Museum of Art
GI Rippey, 1940s, Courtesy of the Rippey Family