Lee Lozano
Lee Lozano (November 5, 1930 – October 2, 1999) was an American painter and conceptual artist. She was born Lenore Knaster in Newark, New Jersey, and started using the name Lee when she was fourteen, sometimes going by the mysterious nickname “E.”
She studied at the University of Chicago (1948–1951), earning a BA in philosophy and natural sciences. In 1956 she married Adrian Lozano, a Mexico‑born architect; they divorced in 1960. She also earned a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago. After spending a year traveling in Europe, Lozano moved to New York City to pursue art. Her first exhibition was at the Bianchini Gallery in 1966. Early on, her paintings and drawings had a raw, expressive style. Her comix often showed hand tools made to look like genitalia or placed in suggestive positions, sometimes with provocative text.
In the late 1960s Lozano explored a more minimalist approach, making monochrome Wave paintings about the physics of light. She, like other artists of her time, began doing conceptual art projects. In February 1969 she started the General Strike Piece, telling herself to gradually and firmly avoid public art events in order to study total personal and public revolution, while showing only work that shared ideas about this revolution.
In 1969 Lozano began the Grass and No-Grass pieces, where she smoked and tried to abstain from marijuana for weeks at a time. Her work from that year appeared in 0 to 9, an avant-garde magazine. In August 1971 she started the Decide to Boycott Women project, a one‑month experiment that grew into a twenty-seven‑year refusal to speak to or otherwise relate to women. This included cutting off ties with women who had supported her, such as the feminist curator Lucy Lippard. Some scholars see these works as Lozano rejecting both capitalism and patriarchy.
Lozano also made the Tool Paintings, a series featuring screws, bolts, wrenches, clamps, and hammers anthropomorphized to look like they’re in motion. She began painting objects associated with male power in 1963. In 1967 she created a list of painting titles called ALL VERBS: REAM, SPIN, VEER, SPAN, CROSS, RAM, PEEL, CHARGE, PITCH, VERGE, SWITCH, SHOOT, SLIDE, JUT, HACK, BREACH, STROKE, STOP. Her paintings from this period used gray scales and geometric edges.
Two key works marked her withdrawal from the art world: Untitled (General Strike Piece) (begun in 1969) and Boycott Piece (started in 1971), the latter turning into a permanent ban on interacting with women. Lozano later described Dropout as her hardest work.
After being evicted from her SoHo studio, she moved uptown and then to her parents’ home in Dallas in 1982, starting another phase of private conceptual projects such as Masturbation Investigation and Dialogue Piece. She remained largely out of the public eye until the late 1990s, when she was diagnosed with inoperable cervical cancer. A few concurrent exhibitions in SoHo and at the Wadsworth Atheneum helped revive interest in her work before her death in 1999 at age 68.
Lucy Lippard later recalled that Lozano was extraordinarily intense and among the first artists to treat life as art, not just art as life.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 23:00 (CET).