ABOUT

Through her visual art practice Lori Larusso, explores issues of gender, class, and anthropocentrism through the lens of foldaways and domesticity. She embraces color as a carrier of spatial properties, and image as conduit for complex narratives. Visually rich elaborations of life-affirming subjects serve as purposeful symbols of specific time and place.

Larusso’s current research is steeped in both the tangible (material) and intangible (attitudes, rituals, customs, traditions) aspects of food and animals. This includes investigations of the ways in which social norms governing our judgement of the way our foods are produced or grown, packaged, prepared, named, photographed, presented, posted, shared, consumed, and discarded— are often arbitrary but have consequences in how we see these things as good or bad, delightful or disgusting, clean or dirty or indicative of wealth or poverty.

Adjacent to this research is my interest in humans’ paradoxical relationships with the animals that exist closest to us. From pets to livestock to synanthropes (non-domesticated animals that thrive alongside humans and our built environments), Larusso’s work highlights the tenuous line between attraction and revulsion that shapes our relationship to the different species of animals in our lives. This correlates to the tension between the appealing/palatable and unappealing/unpalatable aspect of our food systems. It also presses on the artificial divide between humanity and nature, animal and food. In dealing with these issues, her work explores how view ourselves and others.

Lori Larusso is an American visual artist working primarily with themes of domesticity and foodways. Her body of work encompasses paintings and installations that explore issues of class, gender, and anthropocentrism, and how these practices both reflect and shape culture. Larusso’s work is exhibited widely in the US and is included in numerous public and private collections. She has been awarded numerous residency fellowships including Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, McColl Center for Art + Innovation, Sam & Adele Golden Foundation, Art + History Museums Maitland, and MacDowell where she received a Milton and Sally Avery Fellowship. She is a recipient of the Kentucky Arts Council’s Al Smith Fellowship, multiple grants from the Great Meadows Foundation and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Larusso is the 2019 Kentucky South Arts Fellow and is the recipient of the 2020 Fischer Prize for Visual Art. Lori Larusso earned an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and a BFA from the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP). She currently lives and works in Louisville, Kentucky.