Jan 20th, 2020 : Bead Kitchen

[xoxoxoBruce]

If you had 30 million assorted beads, and five years to kill what would you make/build/create?
Liza Lou made a kitchen.



It’s on display at the Whitney, NY. Maybe because she doesn’t have room for two kitchens at her place.
Her own website is dead and the name is for sale so maybe she doesn’t even have a place.
Maybe she’s on the street, hungry, desperate, exhausted from five years of grueling beadery, with the cold
cruel NYC winter wind ripping through her thin cotton chemise. But I digress.

Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019 foregrounds how visual artists have explored the materials, methods, and strategies of craft over the past seven decades. Some expand techniques with long histories, such as weaving, sewing, or pottery, while others experiment with textiles, thread, clay, beads, and glass, among other mediums. The traces of the artists’ hands-on engagement with their materials invite viewers to imagine how it might feel to make each work.

This exhibition provides new perspectives on subjects that have been central to artists, including abstraction, popular culture, feminist and queer aesthetics, and recent explorations of identity and relationships to place. Together, the works demonstrate that craft-informed techniques of making carry their own kind of knowledge, one that is crucial to a more complete understanding of the history and potential of art.

Typical bohemian hippie artist, drippings on the bottom of the oven and dirty dishes in the sink.

link