184. Liza Lou

Los Angeles-based artist Liza Lou is widely known for introducing beads as a contemporary fine art medium. Lou’s persistent experimentation has challenged hierarchies and helped to redefine previously marginalized terms such as craft, labor, the feminine, and the decorative. Reviewing her groundbreaking Kitchen (1991–1996) at the New Museum in New York, Roberta Smith wrote, “…this radiant piece effortlessly annihilates any barriers between art and craft, [and] proves unequivocally… that quality is where you find it and will not be denied.”¹

In the two and a half decades since Kitchen, Lou’s oeuvre has expanded to include numerous room size sculptures, including Back Yard (1996–1998), a 500-square-foot work comprised of 250,000 pieces of beaded grass; Trailer(1998–2000), a forty-foot-long mobile home with a glittering film noir interior; and Security Fence (2005), a chain link and razor wire fence enclosure covered in silver-lined glass beads that both attracts and repels, transforming a symbol of confinement.

In 2002, Lou was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and moved to KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, where she operated an art studio and women’s advocacy program from 2005–2020. There, Lou explored the capacity of beads to stand in for the paint medium in a body of Minimalist woven works. For example, The Waves (2013–2017) comprises an installation of over one thousand woven white cloths which cover gallery walls from floor to ceiling. Through the process of weaving, each cloth is “painted” with the residue of natural oils from the artist and her assistant’s hands. In 2020, Lou returned to her solo practice in Los Angeles and began a series of abstract, gestural oil paintings on woven, glass-beaded cloths. 

Lou and Zuckerman discuss living in a state of wonder, meditating, bending the light, endurance, labor, repetition, focusing on beauty, God, the intersection between fine art and craft, suffering and pain, truth and who is “with you!”