The Journey Behind Liza Lou’s Behemoth Beaded Kitchen

At gatherings, guests tend to gravitate towards the glow and buzz of the kitchen. Similarly, ever since its first exhibition in 1996, Liza Lou’s “Kitchen,” a shimmering sculptural installation depicting a life-sized kitchen completely coated in millions of tiny, shiny, color-saturated glass beads, has drawn viewers into its particular glimmer and gravity.

The seductive beaded surfaces glitter under the gallery lights of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Museum-goers pause and murmur to each other, wondering how it was made (by meticulously glueing beads by hand, one-by-one, to found and fabricated kitchen elements), how long it took Lou to make it (five years), and pointing out favorite details: a beaded grocery list, a beaded dustpan full of beaded detritus, swirls of beaded water streaming out of a beaded faucet.

The 168-square-foot installation, a monument to unrecognized women’s labor, started off as a riff on Pop Art, as seen in the razzle-dazzle brand-name cereal boxes and cleaning products scattered throughout the scene. But over the years of making the work, Lou became increasingly activated around feminism and started to see beads as a metaphor for the female experience: “small, pretty, diminutive, decorative — those sorts of things that are kind of pejorative that we have around femininity, around women,” she said. 

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