Liza Lou (b. 1969) in an American artist known for her large-scale beaded sculptures. Lou was born in New York City and briefly studied at the San Francisco Art Institute. Lou came to prominence in 1996 when her room-size sculpture, Kitchen, was shown at the New Museum in New York. The to-scale, extremely detailed replica of a kitchen painstakingly covered in glass beads took five years to complete. It is now in the Whitney Museum's permanent collection. Labor, confinement and human endurance are themes established in Kitchen that are pillars in Lous work today. Lou has exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Fondation Cartier, France, Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2005, Lou established a studio with Zulu beadworkers in South Africa, and today divides her time between her studios in Los Angeles and KwaZulu-Natal. Lou is the recipient of a 2013 Anonymous was a Woman Award and she is a 2002 MacArthur Fellow.