Beads of Sweat

When people see Liza Lou’s art for the first time, they figure she must be some kind of a nut. Why else would anyone construct an entire suburban backyard and cover it in glass beads? What sane person would devote five years to beading a kitchen?

“People assume I’m insane before they meet me--they expect me to show up in frizzy hair and dirty slippers,” the 29-year-old artist says with a laugh during a conversation at her Topanga Canyon studio. “When they meet me, they’re really disappointed.”

Not likely--Lou is quite a charmer--but it is surprising to discover that this petite, soft-spoken person is the source of the ferocious torrent of energy required to create “Kitchen” and “Back Yard,” two extravagant environments on view at the newly opened Santa Monica Museum of Art at Bergamot Station.

Begun in 1991 and completed in ‘95, “Kitchen” is a 168-square-foot kitchen transformed into a glittering hallucination. Cluttered with the odds and ends of a typical kitchen--dirty dishes, cereal boxes, old newspapers, appliances, food--Lou’s piece is an archetypal kitchen gone surreal: Everything, down to the dust in the dustpan, is covered in beads.

Similarly, “Back Yard,” which Lou started in 1995 and finished last year, pirouettes on the cliche of a backyard. Picnic table and barbecue, laundry hung out to dry, gardening tools, flowers and buzzing bees--the American dream of leisure perfected in the ‘50s has been recast by Lou as a blazing, 528-square-foot jewel.

The word “obsessive” comes up a lot in discussions of Lou’s art, but in talking with her it becomes clear that that’s really not her starting point. Devotional is a better description for the artist’s relationship with her work, which she perceives as an homage to the virtue of simple labor and the power of the human imagination. Lou’s art can also be seen as a souvenir of her desire to give physical form to the vision she sees in her head.

Key to the completion of “Back Yard”--which had its first showing in January at the Fundacio Joan Miro in Barcelona--was Lou’s ability to communicate the vision so successfully to others that they were willing to roll up their sleeves and help her. In terms of production, the most daunting aspect of “Back Yard” is the carpet of grass that unifies the piece visually. Nearly 1 million blades of grass make up that carpet, and to produce them, Lou and the Santa Monica Museum hosted afternoon socials, inviting volunteers to bead grass.

“The grass in Minnesota, where I grew up, is such a saturated green, it’s as if it’s lit from within,” says Lou in explaining the prominence she’s assigned the grass in “Back Yard.” “As a kid I was always struck by the beauty of it, and I’ve been thinking about using wire this way for years. The grass is woven into 80 flats and each of them uses different shades of green, so there’s movement in the pattern.

“You’d think it would be impossible to put an individual stamp on something as simple as beads strung on a piece of wire, but the grassers all worked differently,” she adds. “There were 20 regulars who met every Saturday for six months, and it was a wonderful mix of men and women of different ages and ethnicities.

“Having a community of people involved obviously helped--had I done the grass alone, it would’ve taken years,” she adds. “But I’m ultimately alone in the project in that when things fail it’s my failure. And there are failures on a daily basis because every part of the piece is a new challenge. For instance: How do you make a flower that won’t flop over? How do you build a tree?

“I decided the way to do it was to start with the leaves, which are papier ma^che, newspaper, glue and tape,” says Lou of the tree, which is constructed out of wood, wire mesh and resin, the latter poured inside the structure for fortification. “The tree uses sequins, which I didn’t use at all in ‘Kitchen.’ Leaves glitter like a Sparklett’s water truck, so sequins seemed more truthful than beads for the tree.”

Before embarking on a new part of the piece, Lou began by making drawings. A self-taught carpenter, she learned as a student studying sculpture that to create something big, you start with the tiniest element then build on it.

“ ‘Back Yard’ started with the salad bowl--that seemed achievable to me--and everything grew from there,” says Lou, who considers herself an artist who paints with beads. She bristles, in fact, when people call her “the bead lady.” “I’m not in love with beads,” she firmly declares, although in the next breath she’s talking about them with a sense of wonder.

“Beads are produced in Venezuela and Japan, but the finest ones are made in the Czech Republic, where they’ve always excelled at crystal and glass,” she explains. “A bead warehouse is like Willie Wonka’s Chocolate Factory for me--it’s a kind of paradise, full of great sacks with vast, sparkling worlds pouring out of them.

“Beads are made by taking long canes of glass, torching them so the glass melts enough that you can stretch it, then clipping it into beads. The beads are then sent to Indonesia where people sit on dirt floors and thread them onto long strings. Each bead has been touched and labored over. Isn’t that incredible? There’s power there before you even begin using them in work.”

Born in New York in 1969, Lou spent her childhood in Minnesota, where she participated in a program for gifted children at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts.

“My mom is a writer and she raised my older sister and I to believe that to be able to do things with your hands is great,” recalls Lou, whose parents divorced when she was 5. “I remember seeing an exhibition of work by George Segal at the Walker Art Center when I was 8 and knowing then I would devote my life to making art.”

In 1979, Lou’s family moved to San Diego. Lou was eager to begin her life as an artist, so she charged through high school, graduated when she was 16, and immediately left home to attend the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, where she studied photography. She quickly lost interest in that and returned to San Diego, attending Palomar Community College from 1986 to ’88. While at Palomar she was awarded a scholarship to the San Francisco Art Institute.

Lou’s introduction to beads came when she was 18 and a friend took her to a craft store in San Diego. “I walked in and thought, ‘Wow, what an untapped market!’ ” she recalls. “I bought some beads and started thinking about how to use them.”

Lou spent the summer of 1988 in Italy, where the mosaics and cathedrals of the Renaissance led her to ask herself how she could create work of comparable splendor. When she returned, she headed for the San Francisco Art Institute.

“I quickly discovered I didn’t belong there,” she recalls. “Getting a scholarship to an art school was a big deal for me, and to finally get into art school and discover I didn’t belong was terrible. I was making tableaux that incorporated beads, but nobody liked them and everybody kept telling me it wasn’t art. After two months of that I thought, ‘Why don’t I just quit and get a studio--then I won’t have anyone hanging over my shoulder and judging me.’

“So I went home to San Diego with my tail between my legs and got a job as a secretary,” she continues. “I was living at my mother’s house and I started beading soup cans and macaroni boxes meant to be worn--the idea being that a woman’s body is like a supermarket. Art school had drained the joy from making things for me, and with those pieces I felt myself beginning to reclaim the wonderment I’d experienced through art as a kid.

“Then one day in 1989 I was standing in my mother’s kitchen and I had an epiphany: I thought ‘I’m gonna bead this kitchen--in fact, I’m gonna bead the world!’ Suddenly the world looked lackluster to me and I wanted to see it covered in beads. So I started beading things in my bedroom.”

In 1990 Lou married her childhood sweetheart, musician Eric Smith, and the following year work on “Kitchen” began in earnest. In 1991 she and her husband moved to a small apartment in Silver Lake, and Lou worked as a waitress while her husband attended school. After a year in Silver Lake, the couple moved to a loft downtown at 7th Street and Santa Fe Avenue, where they stayed for two years.

“The minute I saw that huge space I said to myself, ‘Now what are you gonna do little lady?’ That was when ‘Kitchen’ really kicked into gear,” she recalls. “I found a stove abandoned on the street that we schlepped into the studio, and at the end of the hall in our building somebody’d left a wonderful Coldpoint refrigerator from the ‘50s that was just waiting for me.”

In 1993, the couple moved again, this time to West Hollywood, where they continued to struggle financially.

“Early in 1994 I was in a bad state,” she recalls. “We didn’t have a dime and I’d gotten a studio in a building at Melrose and Western that was totally gutted--I was the only occupant. Then the 1994 earthquake destroyed the studio. I had two hours to get everything out of the building before it was sealed off, so some friends helped me throw everything in a truck and we moved again, this time to a loft in an industrial area of San Diego.”

By September 1994, the stress of repeated moves and chronic lack of funds began to take a toll and the marriage unraveled. Because Lou couldn’t afford to stay alone in the loft she’d shared with her husband, she wrote letters to collectors who’d supported her work. Among them were Peter and Eileen Norton, who bought several objects from the “Kitchen,” thus making it possible for Lou to stay in San Diego through 1995 and complete “Kitchen.”

In January 1996, “Kitchen” was shipped off to be exhibited for the first time, in a group show at the New Museum in New York. “That show was a huge moment for me because it represented this long journey that involved losing everything and pressing on--I really came into my adulthood in that five-year period,” says Lou.

Reviews tended to interpret “Kitchen” as a feminist screed, and though Lou says the piece is indeed “a testament to all those who’ve toiled in the kitchen,” she quickly adds “it’s never been my intention that my work be read as a tome to women’s rights. To me it’s more an homage to a particular kind of labor. I don’t like overtly didactic art because I believe feminism has the capacity to embrace all of what it is to be a woman--all that sensuality and the love of men.”

Lou spent 1996 in San Diego making drawings and small objects for “Back Yard.” In December 1997, the Nortons purchased the entire “Kitchen,” and the infusion of funds enabled the artist to move to Topanga Canyon, where work on “Back Yard” accelerated dramatically.

“It was hard selling ‘Kitchen’ and I did a lot to prevent that from happening,” says Lou. “I’m glad the Nortons have it, though, because they’ve proven to be wonderful custodians of ‘Kitchen’ and they’re great about making sure it gets seen.”

Reflecting on the physical demands of her art, Lou says, “I’ve always been driven and was raised by someone who used to say, ‘As long as you’re awake, you might as well work.’ When I have a deadline, I get up at 4 in the morning and work 18-hour days. Emotionally it’s hard because you’re living in your head, and making this work is hard on my body too.

“I’ve had lots of trauma with my hands and I learned the hard way it’s not acceptable to run my body into the ground in service of the work,” she adds. “I wear hand braces when I work now, and sometimes deadlines have to wait. I’m used to working with pain, but it got to the point that it was intolerable. By the time I finished ‘Kitchen,’ I couldn’t even hold a pencil.”

Compounding the challenge is the fact that “Kitchen” and “Back Yard”--which will begin an extended tour of American museums at the conclusion of the Santa Monica Museum show--represent only part of Lou’s production. Yet to be seen locally is “Portrait Gallery,” 42 monochromatic portraits of U.S. presidents framed in gold and hung in an environment inspired by American colonial furniture. Slated to open at the Aspen Art Museum on June 4, that installation has been touring U.S. museums for the past two years. Lou is also doing preparatory research for a major installation she declines to discuss, and is in the midst of a letter-writing campaign she hopes will result in obtaining permission to bead the interior of a cathedral or chapel somewhere in America.

“Each work I make carries the vision of the next piece, and ‘Back Yard’ was like a prayer involving community and process. Working on the interior of a cathedral wouldn’t be an attempt to top ‘Back Yard,’ rather it would be a celebration of beads as an accouterment of spiritual life. The word ‘bead’ means prayer in Hebrew.

“Making work this labor intensive demands some kind of spiritual reckoning,” she says, “and I like the idea of making a piece that honors mindfulness.”

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“Liza Lou: Kitchen and Back Yard,” Santa Monica Museum of Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Building G 1. Wednesdays through Sundays, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Ends July 5. Suggested donation: $3. (310) 586-6488.