JEFF WHIPPLE CAREER OVERVIEW

Since 1980, Jeff Whipple has had 86 solo exhibitions in galleries, colleges and museums including the Tampa 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 will have a 50-year retrospective at the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art in Tarpon Springs, Florida in the fall of 2025. The show will travel to the Spartanburg Museum of Art in South Carolina in 2026.

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. 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. In 2018, he won a $25,000 artist grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.

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, and Northern Illinois University.