Liza Lou (b. New York, NY) is widely known for introducing beads as a contemporary fine art medium. Lou’s persistent experimentation has challenged hierarchies and injected humor and glamour into a Feminist vision. 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 Her numerous room size sculptures include 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 whose interior features a lush and glittering crime scene, addressing the glamorization of violence in American culture; 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 incarceration.
From 2005–2020, Lou lived and worked in Durban, South Africa, where she founded an art studio and women’s advocacy program. During that time, she focused on the intimacy and physicality of weaving as both subject and art object. Artworks in her series The Waves (2013–2017) are made of over one thousand white cloths which cover gallery walls from floor to ceiling; each cloth is composed of beads and thread and contains traces of fingerprints and oils accumulated during their making, both marking time and asserting the works as natural oil paintings.
Though known for her community-based approach, Lou’s current work emerges from a period of solitude spent living and working alone in the Mojave desert in Southern California. From an undiluted experience immersed in nature, Lou examines one of the most fetishized aspects of painting—the brushstroke. Having discovered that pigment looks like clusters of beads under a microscope, Lou now applies beads directly to canvas. Freeing her material in this way has enabled her to work intuitively in a stroke-by-stroke decision making process, signaling a return to bright coloration as pure chroma explodes off the canvas and expanding the traditional definition of painting.
Lou has had numerous solo gallery exhibitions around the world, including Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris and Salzburg (2023, 2016, 2014, 2010, 2004); Lehmann Maupin, London, New York, Seoul and Hong Kong, (2021, 2019, 2018, 2017); and White Cube, London (2015, 2012, 2006). Solo museum exhibitions include the Brooklyn Art Museum, Brooklyn, NY (2024); Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY (2015); Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA (2013); SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2011); Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf, Germany (2002), the Bass Museum of Art, Miami, FL (2001) and the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO (1998). Group exhibitions include Color is the First Revelation of the World, Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, CA (2024); The Interior Life, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (2023); SUPERPOSITION & Engagement, 21st Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, Australia (2018) and 19th Century and Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (2010). Lou’s work is held in a number of public collections, including the Brooklyn Art Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, OH; Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris, France; François Pinault Foundation, Palazzo Grassi, Venice, Italy; Hill Foundation, New York, NY; La Fundación Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaår, the Netherlands; and National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Liza Lou is the recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2002) and an Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2011). Rizzoli Electa recently published their second comprehensive monograph on the artist’s work, including essays by Glenn Adamson, Cathleen Chaffee, Elisabeth Sherman, Carrie Mae Weems, and Julia Bryan-Wilson.
¹ Roberta Smith, Fine Art and Outsiders: Attacking the Barriers, New York Times, Feb. 9, 1996, New York Times
Artist portrait by Mick Haggerty