page_title: Liza Lou
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Liza Lou / Life
caption_attribution_description: English: Continuous Mile by Liza Lou at display in the Corning Museum of Glass
context_page_description: Liza Lou is an American visual artist best known for producing large scale sculpture using glass beads.
context_section_description: Liza Lou was born in New York City and raised in Los Angeles. Lou attended San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA, but dropped out in 1989 when it became evident her professors did not take her work with beads seriously.
  Lou came to prominence with the 168-square-foot (15.6 m²) work Kitchen (1991-1996), 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 (1996-1999), for which Lou enlisted the help of volunteers to recreate grass in a 525-square-foot (48.8 m²) model of a backyard. Kitchen is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Back Yard is in the permanent collection of the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris.
  In 2005, Lou moved from Los Angeles to Durban, South Africa. In Durban, she created many  sculptures and paintings with the help of 50 South African beadworkers.
  In 2006, Lou started creating one of her most notable works, Continuous Mile, with help of a team of Zulu women. Continuous Mile is composed of more than 4.5 million black beads, sewn into ropes which are then coiled into a cylindrical shape. The theme of this work is "work," or process. As Lou states, "The idea was to employ as many people as possible, using the slowest possible technique in order to engage a community, and to build homes in the process of making an art work."
  Lou won the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2002 and the Anonymous Was a Woman Artist Award in 2013. She currently lives and works in KwaZulu-Natal and Los Angeles.
caption: Continuous Mile by Liza Lou in display at the Corning Museum of Glass
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