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.

Glenn Adamson is a curator and writer who works at the intersection of craft, design history, and contemporary art. Julia Bryan-Wilson is professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Cathleen Chaffee is chief curator of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. Elisabeth Sherman is assistant curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Carrie Mae Weems is an artist.