Liza Lou: American Idol

Liza Lou, an American artist and winner of a 2002 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, is known for her large-scale sculptures and environments made from glass beads. Lou’s brightly colored sculptures create tension between the sparkling beauty of their surfaces and their frequently dark themes, suggesting that America’s polished, projected image belies the nation’s underlying turmoil. This catalog from the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris features Lou’s ongoing series American Presidents—42 presidential portraits made of silver and glass beads—along with other sculptures and drawings. American Presidents was first exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution’s Renwick Gallery in November 2000—a time when the U.S. had no president during the recount of ballots in Florida to determine whether Al Gore or George W. Bush had won the election—hence a blank face for number 42. Lou states that the glittering portraits symbolize “grand campaign promises of a sparkling future,” which can rarely be realized due to the complexity of the task. (Smithsonian, January 2001, 24). Lou does not integrate American Idol (Gunmetal Gray)—a portrait of Barack Obama framed by gray glass beads—into the series, in order to emphasize Obama’s separate status from his white predecessors.