Liz Young

Liz Young (March 29, 1958 – December 22, 2020) 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. 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.

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. Her art has been discussed in ARTnews, Artforum, Frieze, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Village Voice, and is included in the LACMA permanent collection. 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." In 2016, Young received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship; she was recognized with awards from the Getty Trust and Andy Warhol Foundation, among others. Young lived and worked in Los Angeles from 1981.