Liz Lea’s Back Bay home is so filled with good things to look at, it’s hard to know where to start. Bold contemporary portraits by Julian Opie and Chuck Close gaze out over handmade, mid-20th-century Danish furniture and rugs; playful Pop pieces by James Rosenquist and Claes Oldenburg interact with small sculptures of classic columns, one Ionic and one Corinthian, handcrafted out of white gym socks by Boston-based artist Larimer Richards and set in the middle of the nearby dining table. " Larimer swears the socks are brand new! " says Lea, a dynamic blue-eyed blonde sporting Heidi braids, a mod Dior kerchief, and exceedingly high platform shoes. Her enthusiasm for modern and contemporary art and furnishings is infectious, and that’s one reason her private tours of her home and collection — given through Boston Center for Adult Education, Brookline Adult and Community Education, and the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, and always accompanied by a light gourmet meal and cocktails served in stemware etched with New Year’s resolutions by Boston-based artist Sheila Gallagher — are becoming a must-see for Boston art lovers.
Articulate, outgoing, and often outrageous, Lea says that giving tours " brings together all the things I give my greatest effort and time to — entertaining, educating, holding court. My visitors love it because it feeds so many of their senses. And it makes me more rigorous about collecting. " She began these tours around 1996; the first one was done as a benefit for the Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay, and she remembers it as being awful. " I didn’t have terribly good art, the food was dreadful, the tour was dreadful . . . and they loved it! That’s what really got me excited about doing tours. If they could love that, imagine how they’d feel about something really good. So, that was an excuse to go shopping for art. And it got better and better! " Even now, her collection, which comprises painting, sculpture, drawing, glass, photography, furniture and more, is constantly evolving. " With art, with furnishing, with anything, it’s got to keep you looking. As soon as some piece of art or furnishing doesn’t work anymore, out it goes. It’s perishable in this collection. "
The former IBM administrator started by collecting modern masters like Roy Lichtenstein and Alex Katz, but she says it’s acquiring and learning about new pieces by new artists that keeps the tour fresh for her. She arranges her collection to bring out art-history themes and create visual resonances, often via unexpected juxtapositions. In one of her bathrooms, an early modernist Sonia Delaunay work is paired with contemporary Boston-based artist Lisa Costanzo’s drawing of the bride of Frankenstein’s monster, just above Lea’s bright melon-colored Pratesi hand towels. " One thing I will never do is just place art ‘picture, picture, picture, picture.’ God, is that boring! And that way, you don’t make ’em look. " Taking her tour, you’d be hard-pressed to argue that she doesn’t make a very good point. Not to mention a very good mimosa.
Sign up for tours of Liz Lea’s art collection — complete with a light meal — on April 12 or May 31 from 10:30 am to 12:30 p.m., or May 13 from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., by calling the Boston Center for Adult Education at (617) 267-4430. Register for her April 29 tour, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., by calling Brookline Adult and Community Education at (617) 730-2700 (ask for Elizabeth Laurence’s class). Or register for her May 17 tour, 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., by calling the Cambridge Center for Adult Education at (617) 547-6789.
