Museum Spotlight: Liza Lou: Trailer

Peer into a mysterious scene within Trailer by artist Liza Lou. In her paintings, sculptures, and installations rigorously assembled from glass beads, Lou interrogates notions of power, myth, and gender in the United States. Marshaling time itself as a material, the artist both illuminates acts of invisible labor and encourages discovery: in Trailer, an eerie narrative emerges. 

On public view for the first time in a decade, Trailer is a major addition to the Brooklyn Museum’s collection. The work fills the interior of a 1949 Spartan Royal Mansion mobile trailer stationed in the Museum’s entry pavilion. Inside, the colors are limited to replicate the allure and intensity of Hollywood film noir. Everything is rendered in glass beads, from the furniture, typewriter, and glossy men’s magazines to the guitar, guns, and shots of whiskey. Trailer thus demands close looking—at both its intricacy and its allusions, questioning what is revealed and what is hidden. Like pixels, the beads dazzle and coalesce into shapes and patterns, forming a sinister spectacle that examines masculinity, despair, isolation, and obsession.

Museum Spotlights are intimate installations of noteworthy collection works, recent acquisitions, and loans, presented to encourage deeper conversations about art, history, and justice.