Housewife Beads The World!" screams the headline of a newspaper on a table in Liza Lou's Kitchen, next to a glittery blue bowl of cereal. But in this kitchen the newspaper isn't real and the cereal isn't edible—they're beaded. Welcome to the world of Liza Lou, a surreal, 168-square-foot evocation of a 1950s kitchen constructed of 10 million tiny glass beads that took five years to create. And if 29-year-old Lou has her way, she—like the headline wife—will indeed bead the world.
Ranging from a $700 pair of bead-bedecked socks to an average $30,000 for lawn mowers and laundry baskets to her (not yet priced) 528-square-foot Back Yard (replete with beaded charcoal grill and 1 million blades of beaded grass), Lou's creations have attracted such collectors as actor Leonard Nimoy, who calls her work "extraordinary." It's also rich in meaning. Kitchen suggests that a woman's work is never done. Back Yard, says Lou, implies that suburbia is never as "permanently perfect" as her own clichéd version.
Lou's own upbringing in suburban Minneapolis was shattered in 1974 when her father, Peter Lou, and her mother, Marie Jordan, divorced. Five years later, Jordan, a poet, moved Liza and her sister Christa, now 31, to San Diego; Liza attended the San Francisco Art Institute. In 1994, Lou separated from childhood sweetheart Eric Smith after four years of marriage. She now lives modestly in an L.A. Topanga Canyon studio apartment and dates sculptor Timothy Eames, 48. Says Lou: "I feel really lucky."
She should also feel proud. Says Susan Bay, a board member of L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art and Nimoy's wife: "Her work touches on the soul and how we live our lives."
Your Reaction
