Lee Lozano
(American, 1930–1999)
Biography
Lee Lozano was an American artist known for both her paintings and radical Conceptual Art projects. Lozano’s energetic drawings and paintings of male genitalia, tools, and facial features, elicit the painterly touch and comic-book forms seen in Philip Guston’s late work. “Lee was extraordinarily intense, one of the first, if not the first person (along with Ian Wilson) who did the life-as-art thing,” the critic Lucy Lippard said of her. “The kind of things other people did as art, she really did as life—and it took us a while to figure that out.” Born Lenore Knaster on November 5, 1930 in Newark, NJ, received her BA from the University of Chicago in 1951, and her BFA from The Art Institute of Chicago in 1960. During her time in Chicago, she married the architect Adrian Lozano, though they divorced in 1960, she kept his name. Moving to New York that same year, Lozano befriended artists such as Carl Andre, Sol Lewitt, and Dan Graham. By the end of the 1960s, she had mostly stopped painting and begun projects critically targeting the art world. Though she still maintained some friendships, Lozano mostly withdraw from public life as evinced in her General Strike Piece (1969) and Decide to Boycott Women (1971). These projects effectively cut ties with other members of her gender, while her Dropout Piece (c. 1970), consisted of abandoning art completely. Moving into her parents’ home in Texas in 1982, Lozano died of cancer on October 2, 1999 in Dallas, TX. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Wadsworth Museum in Hartford, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, among others.
Lee Lozano Artworks
Lee Lozano
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