Date of Award

Summer 2025

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Department

Art

First Advisor

Abbe Schriber

Abstract

Kitchen (1991–96) was the first major work of art by American artist Liza Lou. It is an installation of a life-size kitchen in which every surface and object is covered in glass beads. Kitchen, which Lou refers to as a monument to women’s unsung domestic labor, received considerable critical attention and drew the artist into ongoing conversations around the relationship between “fine art” and “craft” and about the role of feminism in the art of the 1990s. In contemporary interviews, however, Lou expressed discomfort with the label of “craft” as well as with feminist art that she considered “didactic.”

The glittering, over-the-top aesthetic of Kitchen has been described by some critics and scholars as camp. I argue that camp is not a minor feature of the installation, but an organizing principle that unifies its formal qualities and politics, accounting for Lou’s then-ambivalent relationship to both feminism and craft, as well as how both operate in the artwork. The concept of “feminist camp,” coined by film scholar Pamela Robertson Wojcik in the early 1990s, provides an explanation for Lou’s presentation of midcentury domesticity, which is at once nostalgic and critical. I posit “craftiness” as a camp approach to traditional craft, which results in Kitchen being about craft but not craft as such. The outcome is a site of radical possibility. Kitchen reminds viewers to celebrate generations of women who have not been given their due, and invites us to imagine a different, more just future.

Rights

© 2025, Aurora X. Bell

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