22 Facts About Liza Lou

Liza Lou was born on 1969 and is an American visual artist.

Liza Lou is best known for producing large scale sculpture using glass beads.

Liza Lou currently has a nomadic practice, working mostly outdoors in the Mojave Desert in southern California.

Liza Lou's work is grounded in domestic craft and intersects with the larger social economy.

Liza Lou was born in New York City, and raised in Los Angeles.

Liza Lou attended the San Francisco Art Institute in San Francisco, California, but dropped out in 1989 when it became evident her professors did not take her work with beads seriously.

Liza Lou came to prominence with the 168-square-foot work Kitchen, a to-scale and fully equipped replica of a kitchen covered in beads.

The work took five years to complete and was followed with Back Yard, for which Liza Lou enlisted the help of volunteers to recreate grass in a 525-square-foot model of a backyard.

Liza Lou's career has subversively pushed the glass bead as a medium in art making from early representational works to more abstract works which evolved out of her time collaborating with skilled bead artisians in South Africa.

Liza Lou's practice evolved from themes of labor and craft to include community.

In 2005, Liza Lou established a studio in Durban, South Africa, a complement to her studio in Los Angeles.

Liza Lou reached out to an organization called Aid to Artisans with an idea that her bead practice could provide income in high crises communities.

In Durban, Liza Lou created many sculptures and paintings working "elbow-to-elbow" with 50 highly skilled South African Zulu beadworkers.

Liza Lou has said that working in Africa imparted to her the importance of how an artwork is made, in that the making cannot be separated from the meaning of the work.

Liza Lou's work came to embrace process over concept as evidenced by her 2016 installation, The Waves.

Liza Lou returned to Los Angeles in 2014 but continued to run her Durban studio, commissioning woven panels and canvas that would be incorporated into her installations.

Liza Lou is revealing more of her own hand in newer works by incorporating painted gestural mark making.

However, when the 2020 Pandemic required isolation and social distancing, Liza Lou found enforced solitude onerous.

Liza Lou single-handedly created this career launching installation throughout the first decade of her 20's.

In 2006, Liza Lou started creating one of her most notable works, Continuous Mile, with help of a team of Zulu women.

For three years Liza Lou collaborated with her Durban Studio artisans in South Africa to stitch together 600 hand sewn beaded cloths.

Liza Lou describes this method as evolving out of exploring the question, 'what can the beads do, that paint can't do.