Artist: Lila Katzen
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About Lila Katzen
Lila Katzen was born and raised in Brooklyn. Early in life, when she realized she wanted to be a painter, she began studying at the Art Students League in Manhattan and later graduated from Cooper Union. She began her career as a painter and as early as 1955 had a solo exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art. A decade later she began working with plastic, and in 1968 she created a multicolored plastic floor with ribbons of black and gold for the Architectural League of New York. In 1970, she made a series of light tunnels for the Sao Paulo Biennale in Brazil, and in 1988 she was the American representative to World Expo 88 in Brisbane, Australia, where she exhibited a 20-foot-high sculpture of Cor-Ten steel.
Katzen’s work is in the permanent collection of museums across the country, including the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, and the Milwaukee Art Center, and it has adorned spaces from Fordham University’s campus at Lincoln Center to the United States Consulate in Hamburg, Germany. Throughout her life, Katzen was a visiting professor at schools around the country, including Wichita State University, Lehman College in New York, and Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. She died in 1998.