As part of the celebrations for the Brooklyn Museum’s 200th anniversary, visitors will encounter an exciting new artwork in the museum’s lobby.
Trailer (1998–2000), the first work by contemporary American artist Liza Lou to enter the museum’s collection, is a large-scale, immersive sculpture contained inside a thirty-five-foot-long 1949 Spartan Royal Mansion mobile trailer, according to a press release.
The work explores themes of masculinity, despair, isolation, and violence with a cinematic flair. This piece will be on view for the first time in over a decade.
The interior of Trailer is completely covered in glass beads, its controlled color palette evoking the stylized aesthetics of Hollywood film noir crime dramas. Combining everyday objects of mobile-home living with traces of masculine-coded interior life, the scene suggests a sinister and mysterious narrative. From magazine covers to hunting gear, an oven range and comfortable couch to a flickering TV, whiskey bottles and crushed cigarette cartons, everything is rendered in beads. These elements coalesce into a foreboding portrait of a man just out of sight, or is he?
Trailer was the third major artwork that Liza Lou created in a series of works exploring idealized suburban America, following Backyard (1996–99) and her iconic work Kitchen (1991–96), a thrumming Technicolor transformation of a kitchen infused with feminist humor and critiques of commercialism, now in the Whitney Museum collection.
Trailer joins a lively array of artwork installed in the museum’s welcoming lobby space. Visitors can step onto the viewing platform and explore the work’s lurid world from within. To expand access for all visitors, particularly those with mobility aids, a digital interactive kiosk will feature a panoramic image and three-dimensional scans showcasing both the interior and individual objects up close.
Visitors can also enjoy an interview with the artist and take a close look at the extensive treatment done by museum conservators in an exclusive Brooklyn Museum–produced video.
On Thursday Nov. 21, Liza Lou will speak as part of a Brooklyn Talk focused on collection artists. Concurrent with Trailer’s debut in Brooklyn, Liza Lou’s exhibition of new work exploring the gestural and microscopic forms of Abstract Expressionist painting—rendered in an array of colorful glass beads—is on view in her solo exhibition Painting at Lehmann Maupin Gallery through Oct. 12, 2024.
