Feminism in Art: Liza Lou's Kitchen

Kitchen by Liza Lou

BIG IDEAS:

Labor/Feminism

Essential Question(s):

How does knowing and using visual art vocabularies help us understand and interpret works of art?
How is a personal preference different from an evaluation?
How do life experiences influence the way you relate to art?
How does learning about art deepen our understanding of how we perceive the world?
How do people contribute to awareness and understanding of their lives and the lives of their communities through art-making?
How does the process of looking at art help us understand the views of a society?
How does art preserve or challenge aspects of life?

Summary/What is this Project About?

In this assignment, students will learn about how the artist Liza Lou transforms everyday reality and addresses issues of feminism, domesticity, craft, time and persistence.

What You Will Learn:

how an artist can convey messages about domesticity, feminism, time and persistence through a work of art.

Absences:

If you are absent, you can do the entire lesson individually! (but it's better if you're in class)

Link to image

Liza Lou

Kitchen

1991–1996

A full-scale and exactingly detailed kitchen encrusted in a rainbow of glistening beads, Liza Lou’s monumental installation took five years to make. After researching kitchen design manuals as well as historical tracts about the lives of nineteenth-century women, Lou made drawings and three-dimensional models to achieve a loose outline of Kitchen’s floor plan. She then fashioned the objects out of paper mâché, painted them, and applied the beads in a mosaic of surface pattern. This work, in Lou’s words, “argues for the dignity of labor”—a labor that here manifests as process and subject alike, and which is linked to gender, since crafts and kitchen work are traditionally female domains. Kitchen might also be read as a commentary on American life—even the American dream—with its ubiquitous products (Tide and Cap’N Crunch), aspirations (glittery surfaces and suburban assimilation), and realities (dishes in the sink and other kitchen drudgery).

https://whitney.org/collection/works/34855

More to learn:

Beads, Labor and Sexy Feminism: Liza Lou in Time Magazine

The Talks interview with Liza Lou

‘My Whole Life Has Been Following This Single Material’: How Liza Lou’s Obsession With Beads Transformed a Village in South Africa article

Sculpture magazine article

In the Studio with Leonardo Benzant-In a way that contrasts with Liza Lou’s concept-driven beadwork, Benzant’s objects reintroduce African concepts and spiritual roots into secular life.

Issues:

Domesticity/Labor at Home
Feminism
Time (TAB)
Persistence (TAB)
Materials

Relevance:

Exhibit at the Whitney (postponed due to Covid-19) craft celebration 50 years
Familiar space transformed
Germs (visible to invisible; can't get rid of them; parallels to domestic life)

ACTIVITY CHOICES

Student Examples

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