Liz Roth

artist for Art 365

November 4, 2015

Liz Roth is an artist who depicts social concerns in a humorous way – whether it's about coworkers functioning as a reluctant substitute family in the United States (Cheeseburger Soup, a series about Madison Department of Transportation workers), or how Americans perceive the relationship between beauty and weight (she completed a nude self-portrait-a-day project for six months, see www.lizroth.com).

Roth has been awarded numerous prestigious painting grants including the Wisconsin Arts Board Individual Artist Fellowship, the national Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant for painting and Oklahoma Visual Artist's Coalition Grant Art 365 (in 2008). She has also been awarded numerous artist residencies: the Wrangell Mountain Center (in Alaska), Jentel Artist Foundation (in Wyoming), the Awagami Paper Factory (in Japan), the Kamiyama (Japan) Artists in Residence program, and the Vermont Studio Center.

The Art 365 grant resulted in Roth's inclusion as one of six artists in a feature length documentary, also titled Art 365. Her installation, America 101, is currently being nationally exhibited. Roth's works have been acquired by many national and international collections, including the Walker Museum of Art, the Museu del Joguet in Spain, the Museum of Awa Japanese Paper, the KAIR Contemporary Art Collection and Yale University.

Art 365 is a catalog of a traveling exhibition sponsored by the Oklahoma Visual Artists Coalition, and exhibited in Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Cedar Rapids, Iowa and Houston, Texas. DiverseWorks curator Diane Barber selected six artists from the hundreds who applied to receive a ten thousand dollar grant, the exhibition, and the opportunity to work with her over the course of the year (2008). OSU's Assistant Professor of Painting, Liz Roth, was one of the selected artists. Images from her ambitious installation, America 101, are included in this catalog. America 101 is a contemporary critique of Americans' uneasy relationship with nature. The installation demonstrates our attempts to ignore what is large while we focus attention on small impermanent disposables.

America 101 consists of 100 very small oil paintings of natural beauty in the United States, as represented by landscape paintings from all 50 states. These landscapes are painted on commissioned wooden boxes to resemble mass-produced commodities. These small paintings are contrasted by a billboard-sized image of a common disposable commodity – the single-use, disposable water bottle. To execute this project, Roth visited all 50 states to paint and photograph the landscape. The catalog depicts the results of her visual investigations.

URL: https://library.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2009-honorees/liz-roth

Last Updated: 14 January 2022