Liza Lou first gained attention in 1996 when her room-sized sculpture Kitchen was shown at the New Museum in New York. Representing five years of individual labour, this groundbreaking work subverted standards of art by introducing glass beads as a fine art material. The project blurred the rigid boundary between fine art and craft, and established Lou s long-standing exploration of materiality, process, and beauty. Working within a craft metier has led the artist to work in a variety of socially engaged settings, from community groups in Los Angeles, to a collective she founded in Durban, South Africa in 2005, to a women s prison in Belm, Brazil, and a bead embroidery collective in Mumbai, India. Over the past 15 years, Lou has focused on a poetic approach to abstraction as a way to highlight the process under-lying her work. In this comprehensive volume that considers the entirety of her singular vision, curators, art historians, and artists offer important perspectives on the breadth of her work.
