Liza Lou valuation
American artist who covered a life-size kitchen in glass beads, and has worked in beads, by hand, ever since.
Liza Lou was born in New York in 1969, grew up in Los Angeles and left the San Francisco Art Institute in 1989, when her teachers would not take her beadwork seriously.
What a work by Liza Lou is worth
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Bio
Liza Lou was born in New York in 1969, grew up in Los Angeles and left the San Francisco Art Institute in 1989, when her teachers would not take her beadwork seriously. She spent five years alone covering a full-size kitchen in millions of glass beads, and Kitchen, first shown at the New Museum in New York in 1996, made her name; it is now in the Whitney Museum of American Art. Back Yard, a beaded lawn and garden made with the help of volunteers between 1996 and 1999, is in the Fondation Cartier in Paris, and Trailer, a life-size beaded caravan of 1998 to 2000, was acquired by the Brooklyn Museum in 2023. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002. In 2005 she set up a studio in Durban with Zulu women skilled in beadwork, and the work moved towards abstraction: woven bead paintings, monumental installations and Continuous Mile, more than four and a half million black beads sewn into ropes and coiled into a cylinder. She later moved her practice outdoors to the Mojave Desert in southern California, working alone again, adding drawing and painting and putting colour at the centre.
Her works are made of glass beads sewn, strung or woven onto fabric, wire and armatures, and they are heavy, labour-intensive and hard to repair, so missing beads, loose thread, sagging and dust need checking, and a beadwork conservator may be needed. The date and the place a work was made, Los Angeles, Durban or the Mojave, help place it. She has shown with White Cube and Thaddaeus Ropac.
Los Angeles, Durban and the Mojave
Solo exhibitions have been held at the Aspen Art Museum and the Bass Museum in Miami in 1998, the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf in 2002, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in 2013 and the Brooklyn Museum in 2024.
She received the Anonymous Was a Woman award in 2013.
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