Liz Young (March 29, 1958 – December 22, 2020Raya, Anna; (February 4, 2021) "Otis College Remembers Alumnx Liz Young (’84 BFA Fine Arts) ", Otis College of Art and Design; Retrieved February 17, 2024) was an American artist based in Los Angeles, California. Her work investigates body- and nature-focused themes, such as loss, beauty, the inevitability of decay, and the fragility of life.John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. "Liz Young," Fellows. Retrieved May 17, 2019.Frank, Peter. "Pick of the Week," LA Weekly, March 6, 1992.Heitzman, Lorraine. "Conduction," Art and Cake, October 14, 2017. She has produced sculpture, installation, performance, painting, drawing and video incorporating fabricated and recontextualized found objects, organic materials, and processes from industrial metalworking to handicrafts, taxidermy and traditional art practices.Urban, Hope. "Forever Young," Los Angeles Reader, December 16, 1993.Fox, Howard N. "Liz Young," Dignity of Survival: Desire and Destiny, Exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1993.Korten, Noel. "Liz Young," City of Los Angeles Fellowship Grants 2001, Catalogue, Los Angeles: City of Los Angeles, 2001.Burnham, Linda. "L.A. Reviews," High Performance, August 1986.
Young exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, including solo shows at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), and alternative spaces such as Hallwalls, Randolph Street Gallery (Chicago) and New Langton Arts (San Francisco); she participated in group shows at Exit Art, Art in the Anchorage, and Armory Center for the Arts, among others.Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Dignity of Survival: Desire and Destiny , Exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1993. Retrieved May 17, 2019.Myers, Holly. "Social Issues leave imprint in Touched," Los Angeles Times, August 22, 2007. Retrieved May 17, 2019. Her art has been discussed in ARTnews,Mifflin, Margot. "Performance Art: What is it and where is it going?" ARTnews, April, 1992. Artforum,Rinder, Larry. "Robot Redux," Artforum, November 1992. Retrieved May 17, 2019. Frieze,Grabner, Michelle. "Liz Young: Randolph Street Gallery," Frieze, October 1997. Los Angeles Times,Muchnic, Suzanne. "One Speaks, the Other Bleeds," Los Angeles Times, June 2, 1986. The New York Times,Smith, Roberta. "When the Medium Doesn't Agree," The New York Times, August.28, 1992. Retrieved May 17, 2019. and The Village Voice,Hess, Elizabeth. "No Exit Art," The Village Voice, October 11, 1994. and is included in the LACMA permanent collection.Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "The Birth/Death Chair with Rawhide Shoes, Bones and Organs, Liz Young" Collections. Retrieved May 17, 2019. Critic Peter Frank wrote that her work "reflects both on life's relentless erosion of body and spirit, and on our indomitable struggle against these nagging cruelties."
Artillery Magazine critic Ezrha Jean Black called her 2017 installation a "mordant yet elegiac show" in which "craft bears out the work’s consciousness."Black, Ezrha Jean. "Liz Young – Of Blood And Dirt," Artillery Magazine, May 11, 2017. Retrieved May 17, 2019. In 2016, Young received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship;Greenberger, Alex. "John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Announces 2016 Fellowships," ARTnews, April 6, 2016. Retrieved May 17, 2019. she was recognized with awards from the Getty Trust and Andy Warhol Foundation, among others.Muchnic, Suzanne. "City-Sponsored Freedom," Los Angeles Times, May 20, 2001. Retrieved May 17, 2019. Young lived and worked in Los Angeles from 1981.
Life and career Young was born in Minot, North Dakota in 1958. She spent her childhood moving throughout the American West and Europe due to her father's work. Drawn to handicrafts, she learned carpentry from her father, knitting, weaving and crocheting from her grandmother, and mechanics in her youth. One month after beginning college in 1976, Young was involved in a catastrophic car accident that left her permanently paralyzed from the waist down.Pool, Bob. "Heavy-Duty Art," Los Angeles Times, August 3, 1991, p. B1–2. Retrieved May 17, 2019.Snow, Shauna. "Addressing everyday pain in ‘Survival'," Los Angeles Times, January 5, 1994. Retrieved May 17, 2019. After a long rehabilitation, she attended the University of New Mexico, where her art pairing feminist ideas, diverse materials and processes such as craft was encouraged by artist Harmony Hammond. In 1981, she relocated to Los Angeles to attend Otis College of Art and Design (BFA, 1984), where she was influenced by performance and body artists, such as Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Gina Pane, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler.
After graduating, Young built her knowledge of fabrication through jobs creating molds for artists, welds for the Rose Parade, and specialty props for movies. For her own art, she scavenged alleys, loading docks and junkyards in Los Angeles's downtown industrial area, reclaiming abandoned materials that she reworked into sculptural objects. In 1985, she began exhibiting professionally at alternative spaces such as LACE, and later, New Langton Arts, Center on Contemporary Art (Seattle), and the Santa Monica Museum of Art.Gardner, Colin. "Using Gallery Structure as Canvas," Artweek February 9, 1985, p. 5.Kosenko, Peter. "Mortification as Installation," Visions, Fall 1992, p. 39.Mathieson, Karen. "Dual-Edged COCA Exhibit Shows Man At Odds With Technology," The Seattle Times, July 3, 1990. Retrieved May 17, 2019. In 1993, she became the first artist recognized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's "Here and Now" Young Talent program to receive a sponsored full exhibition there (titled The Dignity of Survival).Newhouse, Kristina. Dialogue: Los Angeles/Prague, Catalogue, Los Angeles and Prague: PØST Gallery and Kappa Museum, 2004. More recently, Young exhibited at PØST, Armory Center for the Arts, the Luckman Center, and Deep River in Los Angeles, Long Beach Museum of Art, and numerous universities and colleges, among other venues. She taught sculpture, art history and digital arts at Los Angeles County High School for the Arts since 2004 and became Visual Arts Department co-chair in 2016.Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. "Liz Young" Visual Arts Department. Retrieved May 17, 2019.
Work Young was sometimes labelled a conceptual artist, due to a generative approach that clusters diverse objects, materials, mediums, and ideas to achieve its expression.Buckley, Annie. "The Horror of Tradition," ArtScene, September 2008. She differed from such artists, however, in her commitment to workmanship, materiality, and leaving evidence of ritualistic, labor-intensive processes such as industrial fabrication and needlecraft.McGrew, Rebecca. "Liz Young" , Museum Exhibitions, Claremont, CA: Pomona College Museum of Art, 1999. Retrieved May 17, 2019. Her work combined fabricated elements (ranging from welded cages and hand-crafted nails to clothing and taxidermy animals), organic materials, and familiar objects evoking memory, which she refashioned and recontextualized. She explored themes involving the body and its limits, the human condition, loss, and the inevitability of nature;Otis College of Art and Design. "Fine Arts Alumnae Awarded Guggenheim Fellowships," News, April 6, 2016. Retrieved May 17, 2019. writers described her art, variously, as challenging and visceral,Myers, Holly. "City Too, benefits from grants," Los Angeles Times, June 14, 2001. Retrieved May 17, 2019. unsettling, black-humored,Calame, Ingrid. "Liz Young at Post," LA Weekly, March 14, 1997.Kandel, Susan. "Personal Meaning," Los Angeles Times, March 7, 1997. Retrieved May 17, 2019. and autobiographical, emotional and haunting.Tanney, Kathy. "Pick of the Week," LA Weekly, May, 1986.Oginz, Richard. The Building of Ritual, Exhibition essay, Los Angeles: Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibits (LACE), 1985.
Body-related sculpture, installations and paintings (1985–2004) Young's early work (e.g., Psychic Bleeding, 1986; The Allowance of Pain, 1990–2), featured crudely-wrought assemblage "machines," arranged in theater-like installations and used in performances (which she termed "live procedures") that investigate bodily issues of endurance, struggle, constraint, and the transcendence of pain and limitation.Wilson, Susanna. "Creating Utopias…," FAD Magazine, 1988.Rickles, Lawrence. "Already Given at the Office: Techno Feminism," Parallax, September 1997. The apparatuses drew on a vocabulary of forms derived from positions of the human body (seated, standing, etc.) and recalled hospital gurneys, operating tables, dunking and electric chairs, confessionals or coffin/cradles.O'Donnell, Shauna M. "The Way of Flesh: The Allowance of Pain," Exhibition essay, San Francisco: New Langton Arts, 1990. The contrary processes and materials of their fabrication, however, often precluded practical function, rendering them, in one description, "ominous and unknowable." Critics such as Roberta Smith of New York Times and Suzanne Muchnic of the Los Angeles Times identified them as homespun and antiquated-looking implements of torture, humiliation or extreme toil that comprised a "horrific prison" of heavy metal contraptions conjuring institutional and political confinement. Vacillating between public and private spheres, the installations physically positioned viewers as complicit voyeurs, potential victims, or perpetrators within spaces and situations implying danger, imprisonment, or ritual.
Like earlier works, The Dignity of Survival (1992–3) served as both an explorable environment and site for Young's physically demanding "live procedures." The work's charged objects, displayed in suspended cage-like structures that viewers could enter, included a medical-like device; a vest-like, pregnant-man "coat of shame" with an umbilical cord leading to a rock; a shaving/shearing stand; and The Birth/Death Chair, a fabricated birthing chair connected to a ball-and-chain-like trail of cast-iron bones and human viscera.Barron, Stephanie, et al. Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000 , University of California Press, 2000. Retrieved May 17, 2019.
Young's subsequent installations extended outward to larger family and social bodies. Mendacity (1996) featured miniature scaled institutional structures (city hall, church, bank, school, hospital, home) clustered like a city block and surrounded by hanging thrift store clothing. Frieze critic Michelle Grabner wrote that its tactile, construction-grade materials and household objects created an "uncanny physical life" capturing the tension between the seductions of institutions and their function of control. For Skin Inn (1997), Young constructed an oddly furnished (the cruciform Cross Bed, a grafted junk chair-and-love seat, and seesawing dining chairs) mobile home, which housed a silent, opening-night performance by a "family" of three as viewers peered in through doors and windows.Ehmke, Ronald. "In artist's nightmare scenario, a sinister sameness," The Buffalo News, October 1, 1997. Writers interpreted the installation and mysterious, ritual-like performance—which included cutting Young out of a cocoon-like dress—as a satirical subversion of everyday rituals expressing the horror of confinement and repetition.Ise, Claudine. "Articulating Grief through the Art of Loss ," Los Angeles Times, April 16, 1999. Retrieved May 17, 2019.Min, Susette. Catalogue essay, The Mourning After, Catalogue, Los Angeles: Los Angeles Municipal Gallery, 1999.