Lee Lozano

The artist Lee Lozano (1930--1999) began her career as a painter; her work rapidly evolved from figuration to abstraction. In the late 1960s, she created a major series of eleven monochromatic <i>Wave</i> paintings, her last in the medium. Despite her achievements as a painter, Lozano is best known for two acts of refusal, both of which she undertook as artworks: <i>Untitled (General Strike Piece)</i>, begun in 1969, in which she cut herself off from the commercial art world for a time; and the so-called <i>Boycott Piece</i>, which began in 1971 as a month-long experiment intended to improve communication but became a permanent hiatus from speaking to or directly interacting with women. In this book, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer examines Lozano´s <i>Dropout Piece</i>, the culmination of her practice, her greatest experiment in art and endurance, encompassing all her withdrawals, and ending only with her burial in an unmarked grave. And yet, although <i>Dropout Piece </i>is among Lozano´s most important works, it might not exist at all. There is no conventional artwork to be exhibited, no performance event to be documented. Lehrer-Graiwer views <i>Dropout Piece </i>as leveraging the artist´s entire practice and embodying her creative intelligence, her radicality, and her intensity. Combining art history, analytical inquiry, and journalistic investigation, Lehrer-Graiwer examines not only Lozano´s act of dropping out but also the evolution over time of <i> Dropout Piece</i> in the context of the artist´s practice in New York and her subsequent life in Dallas.