Lee Lozano

An illuminating study of an overlooked artist from the 1960s whose work has recently returned to the limelight This is the first indepth study of the idiosyncratic tenyear career of Lee Lozano (19301999), assuring this important artist a key place in histories of postwar art. The book charts the entirety of Lozanos production in 1960s New York, from her raucous drawings and paintings depicting broken tools, genitalia, and other body parts to the final exhibition of her spectacular series of abstract Wave Paintings at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970. Highly regarded at the time, Lozano is now perhaps best known for Dropout Piece (1970), a conceptual artwork and dramatic gesture with which she quit the art world. Shortly afterwards she announced she would have no further contact with other women. Her dropout and boycott of women lasted until her death, by which time she was all but forgotten. This book tackles headon the challenges that Lozano poses to art historyand especially to feminist art historyattending to her failures as well as her successes, and arguing that through dead ends and impasses she struggled to forge an alternative mode of living. Lee Lozano: Not Working looks for the means to think about complex figures like Lozano whose radical, politically ambiguous gestures test our assumptions about feminism and the right way to live and work.