A Paradox of Plenty at Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts

through May 3, 2026

(above) Queen Garbage and Her Treasures, 2025

Louisville, Kentucky-based artist Lori Larusso (Massillon, Ohio, 1980 - ) walks her neighborhood, observing the things left behind. She explores an urban ecosystem filled with complex, often contradictory, relationships to material objects. In an era of Al slop, a computer-generated mire of shoddy and inaccurate content, the artist sees what is real. Examining objects closely, she creates still life paintings-sometimes strange cornucopias— overflowing with goods.

In A Paradox of Plenty, our human love of convenience is juxtaposed with the resourcefulness of animals. Synanthropes-undomesticated animals that live in close proximity to people-feast on animal-shaped cakes and tuck themselves into our piles. The result is a bizarre, biodiverse mayhem.

For her laboriously painted panels, Larusso uses masking tape, precisely shaped and cut, to create sharply detailed paintings with distinct areas of color. She highlights an object's three-dimensionality while accentuating the fact that it is, ultimately, an image. Through vignettes that flow from one to the next, Larusso explores the tension between gratitude and waste, need and gluttony, festivity and finality.