Jeff Whipple: The Wows of the Nows, A Fifty Year Retrospective” celebrates five decades of provocative, concept-driven work by Florida-based artist Jeff Whipple. Known for his razor-sharp wit and realistically rendered metaphorical images, Whipple’s artwork explores themes of mortality, identity, and the absurdity of modern life. Over the past fifty years, he has built a unique style that reflects a lifelong investigation of what it means to perceive, interpret, and inhabit the world, filtered through a lens that is at once skeptical, incisive, and marked by a wry, understated humor.
A statement about this retrospective by Jeff Whipple
When each artwork in this show was made, when their time was now, it was definitely a “wow!” for me. Making each artwork was like yelling “Wow!” about something. Not every now has a “wow!” but art was how I expressed what my nows were. Art is a response to life and life is a collection of what once were nows. This retrospective is how I responded to my nows for fifty years.
The exhibit shows the clear through line from the art I made in 1976 to what I’m making in 2026. From the earliest artwork to the newest, you can see that I’ve always tried to use art to say something beyond technique, beyond the surface. I worked hard to learn the techniques but only to use them to convey some type of idea or feeling. The desire to make storytelling visual art was evident in my early childhood and I stayed with that through my career.
This retrospective originated in 2025 at the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art in Tarpon Springs, Florida. That museum’s curator, Sara Felice spent seven months carefully selecting the artworks that represented fifty years of my career. She made several visits to my studio and looked through the thousands of artworks I have there. It was a gargantuan, mind boggling effort and I’m immensely grateful for her tireless efforts, sensitive eye and detailed knowledge of contemporary and historical art history.
For this exhibit, with Sara’s selection established, I was able to dig out several more pieces from my studio racks and drawers that represent the transitions of my style and content in even greater detail. The result seems more like a book than an exhibition. Each section of the gallery is like a chapter in my life as an artist. Perhaps that’s the most appropriate way to show the life of a visual storyteller.
For every piece in this show there were dozens more that I made and exhibited that year. Every piece here is from my studio storage; none are borrowed from collectors. Every piece in this show was offered for sale at some point in commercial galleries but here they are as blazing proof of how my desire to make poetic art was not exactly a lucrative business decision. Ha! And that aspect made it quite a challenge to fund the creation of the art in this exhibit. It certainly didn’t pay for itself! From the beginning, I had zero family money and big student loan debt. As time went on, my finances only worsened. I had a few part-time college teaching jobs but more often I had to rely on minimum wage menial labor to pay rent, buy food and art supplies. I kept my overhead low. I drove crummy, old rust-eaten cars. I lived in dingy buildings in terrible neighborhoods. A dozen beautiful girlfriends, some of them depicted in this show’s artwork, said, “Oh, hell no!” when they realized my sexy artist lifestyle was actually real, unsexy destitution.
Thankfully, there were many people who showed appreciation for my art over the fifty years and I’ve been honored with huge awards and dozens of exhibitions. That lifted my spirits in dark times and provided inspiration to keep producing.
My entire adult life is represented here. Each artwork, regardless of its imagery, tells me about the studio, city, friends, lovers, pains and ecstasies that were current, that were now then, during their creation. (Those details are in my memoirs!) I’ve always thought that making art was the best way to respond to being alive; using art to express what it’s like to live in a terminal existence in the tiny speck of life between the vast infinity of time before I was born and the unending infinity of time after I die. Within that tiny speck is this enormous retrospective.
It’s an amazing honor have the opportunity to display my retrospective at the Spartanburg Art Museum. Many thanks to Executive Director, Dr. Ryan Teten for seeing value in my art career and facilitating its exhibition.
Jeff Whipple is an award winning artist from Jacksonville, Florida. A painter, a playwright, and a printmaker, Whipple loves to create in any form. His exhibition will feature a selection of both figurative and abstract works from his over fifty-year long career as an artist.
In a career spanning four decades, Jeff Whipple has created acclaimed artwork and writing that is uniquely distinctive and recognizable. He has had 87 solo exhibitions in galleries, colleges and museums including the Tampa Museum of Art, the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art, the Gulf Coast Museum of Art, the Museum of Art, DeLand, and the Boca Raton Museum of Art. His art has been in dozens of group exhibitions across the USA and has received 51 top awards in competitions.
Whipple had a 50-year retrospective at the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art in Tarpon Springs, Florida in the fall of 2025. As a playwright, Whipple has had 22 productions since the mid-1980s, mostly in Chicago and Florida. He’s won several playwriting awards including five Florida statewide playwriting competitions.
Whipple won Florida Individual Artist Fellowships four times from 1982 to 2014 when the program ended. Those fellowships were highly competitive state funded grants selected by museum directors, curators, and arts professionals. He won the same type of state grant in Illinois in 1985 and 1990 when he lived in Chicago. In 2001, he won the $10,000 Fulton Ross Artist Grant. He received artist grants from the Community Foundation of Northeast Florida in 2017 and 2021. In 2018, he won a $25,000 artist grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. In 2024, he was awarded a $10,000 artist grant from the City of Jacksonville.
The Tampa Museum of Art commissioned Whipple to create a large-scale outdoor video and art installation in Miami Beach during the week of Art Basel Miami in 2006. He has had two dozen other major public art commissions since 1998. In the early 1980s, Whipple co-directed a printmaking atelier in Tampa, Florida where he collaborated with many renown artists including Jim Dine, Alice Aycock, James Rosenquist, and Robert Rauschenberg.
Whipple’s artwork is in two dozen corporate, municipal, college and museum collections. He received an MFA in Painting from the University of South Florida in 1980. He has taught at several colleges including Arizona State University, Florida State University, the University of North Florida and Northern Illinois University. He’s written four memoirs, a book of his plays, and a novel. They’re available on Amazon on his author page and there’s info about them on his website.
