Difficult Beauty

Lauren Crux is an artist whose work oscillates between performance, photography and writing. She obtained an MFA in interdisciplinary studio arts from UC Irvine. Her honors include the James Irvine Foundation Honorary Fellowship, a major project grant from the Arts Research Institute of UCSC, as well as fellowships at the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Ireland. In 2016 she was awarded the LGBTQ Lifetime Achievement Award of Santa Cruz County, California. She is a psychotherapist and lives in Santa Cruz, California.

"Difficult Beauty: Rambles, Rants and Intimate Conversations" by fine artist and writer Lauren Crux, pairs 66 full-color images from Lauren's long standing photography practice with her frank musings that initially started as a mail art project. A book that offers the reader bits of daily life, in which little things go vast. A visual and contemplative balm to the spirit: for who in these times cannot use a bit of comfort, intelligence, and good humor? "The rambles balance intimacy with openness, artistry with colloquial thought and speech. Crux's gaze is simultaneous vast and minute (which I am coming, I think, to understand, is the way of the soul of Lauren Crux). Just when we think we've come on a silly throw away line, or a cliché, or a normal point of view, she turns the phrase and raise the stakes on us. But she's not showing off. She's just talking to us." -Camille Dungy, author of "Soil: the Story of a Black Mother's Garden" and "Guidebook to Relative Strangers"¿