Liza Lou - Color Field

It took a village — over 500 people beading, sorting, and arranging under Liza Lou’s watchful eyes and plan — to install “Color Field,” Lou’s new 1,100-square-foot work, on view at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York, from November 8, 2015, through February 21, 2016. This monumental shimmering work is comprised of thousands of blades of grass (small stainless steel wires), arranged in brilliant squares of 30 colors (over 2 million tiny glass beads strung on the wires). The installation took four years; a team of 30 Zulu women artisans in Durban, South Africa; and 500 museum volunteers to assemble.

Although its name seems to pay homage to the original Abstract Expressionist and Color Field painters of the 1950s and ’60s such as Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler, Liza Lou, a MacArthur Fellow, emphasized that the title is meant to be read as more open-ended. “I titled the work Color Field for the obvious associations to both an art movement and the fact that it is indeed a physical field of color. However, I think of the work as a meditation on process as harvest and growth, as well as color as subject matter.”

https://hyperallergic.com/250047/visit-liza-lous-color-field-a-1100-square-foot-installation-at-the-neuberger-museum-of-art/

For twenty years, the glass bead has been Liza Lou’s primary art-making material. Lou transforms the possibilities of this tiny unit of color and embellishment just as she expands the meaning of the objects she recreates. Color Field (2010-2013), her newest floor-bound sculpture, features an expansive prism of color. The gridded rainbow is composed of uniform lengths of wire, each threaded with a single shade of beads.

http://www.mcasd.org/exhibitions/liza-lou-color-field