Mina Loy was a modern renaissance woman, notable for the quality and diversity of her creative production: she was an artist, poet, dramatist, novelist, and essayist, as well as an inventor, hat and fashion designer, lamp shade manufacturer, and designer of children's games, among other works. The diversity of her talents, interests, and activities is part of what makes her and her work so difficult to categorize. During her lifetime her creative efforts were mostly seen on two different fronts, poetry and painting, though they too cross the boundaries that often separate genres. She has been depicted as a forgotten but significant modernist poet. Spirited attempts have been made to bring her poetry into the modern literary canon. During her lifetime Ezra Pound defended her work. In 1917 he coined the term "logopoeia" to describe the poetry of Loy and Marianne Moore, arguing somewhat misleadingly that their poetry exemplifies the dance of the intellect, rather than phanopoeia (visual image) or melopoia (musical effect) (Selected Prose 424-5). In a letter to Marianne Moore in 1921, he asked "…is there anyone except you, Bill [William Carlos Williams] and Mina Loy who can write anything of interest in verse" (Selected Letters 168.) By the mid-20s Loy was a formidable presence in modern poetry. She was publishing in the most radical and avante-guard journals between 1914 and the late 1920s: her poems appeared in Rogue, Others, The Dial, The Little Review, transatlantic, Camera Work, and others. In 1923 she published her first book of poems Lunar Baedecker [sic] in Robert McAlmon's Contact Press. In 1926 Yvor Winters wrote that Loy "has written seven or eight of the most brilliant and unshakably solid satirical pieces of our time, and at least two non-satirical pieces that possess for me a beauty that is unspeakably moving and profound" (qtd in Januzzi 546). Kenneth Rexroth, for years an adamant advocate of Loy's poetry, noted in 1944, "There is no question but what she is important and should be reprinted. No one competent and familiar with verse in English in this century would dream of denying it" (np). Jerome Rothenberg referred to her poem "Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose" as being "comparable to, & probably not chronologically behind, Pound's early Cantos & Eliot's Waste Land"; that poem, he says, is "one of the lost master-poems of the 20th century" (57).

With the 1996 publication of Carolyn Burke's biography and the scholarly edition of Loy's selected poems in The Lost Lunar Baedeker, followed by the 1998 collection of critical essays Mina Loy: Woman and Poet, edited by Maeera Shreiber and Keith Tuma, some critics have asserted that the emergence of Loy into mainstream poetic discourse has begun. Roger Conover, to give just one example, in a letter to the editors of Faber and Faber, stressed the importance of Loy's poems:

There is developing around Mina Loy a critical/feminist discourse quite unprecedented in retrospective appraisals of modernist poets. Her reputation is very much on the rise, while other modernists' currency is in decline. She is increasingly being perceived as the "missing modernist," the hidden link in the tradition of Modernist/Feminist poetics. Ten years ago, the Norton Anthology didn't include her at all; in the next Norton anthology, she is represented as fully as Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and Marianne Moore. (248-9)

With an irony that possibly only Loy herself would appreciate, she is being remembered as the forgotten modernist poet. While, at the same time, her work as a visual artist-her drawings, paintings, sculpture, frescoes, assemblages, and objets d'art-has gone largely unnoticed. Loy began as a visual artist (having her first one-woman exhibit in 1912 in London, eleven years before the publication of Lunar Baedecker), and she remained active as a painter long after she stopped writing poems. She generated more visual texts than verbal texts, and she seems to have stopped writing poems by 1950, while as late as 1965 she claimed that she was "not a poet" and that she was "more likely to be able to paint now than to write" (Interview 215). Burke states that Loy "…thought of herself as a painter who accidentally wandered into poetry. Although, briefly, she became famous (or infamous) for her poetry's frank dissection of female psycho-sexual experience, she had already shown paintings in numerous European exhibitions" before her poetry was published. So it is with double sense of irony that Loy is being remembered as a "forgotten" poet and forgotten as an artist. Since the exhibit of her Bowery constructions in 1959, seven years before her death, an exhibition of Loy's art works has not been curated, and, as Burke points out, many of her works have been lost or destroyed. Her art, even more than her poetry, has suffered neglect.

During her lifetime, however, Loy received critical acclaim for her art, beginning even as an art student. About Loy's work as an artist Marisa Januzzi says "There were at least seven notable exhibitions of Mina Loy's work during her lifetime, besides the long-running commercial display of the lampshades in the mid-twenties" (511). If we gather together the available materials about Loy's art exhibits, we can see that Loy actively exhibited visual art from her first exhibit in the 1904 Salon d'Automne in Paris through the early 1930s, culminating in her one-woman show in the Julien Levy Gallery in New York, January 24 to February 14, 1933. Loy also published reproductions of some of her unexhibited artwork in The Dial, Playboy, Art Review, and Arts & Decoration. In the 1940s and 50s she made a variety of constructions from refuse and discarded objects that she found in the garbage and on the streets of New York City's lower East side and later in Aspen, Colorada. Some of her Bowery constructions were exhibited in her final exhibition in 1959.

Loy began her artistic career by studying art in London following in the tradition of the Pre-Raphaelites. She followed this by a year as an art student in Munich (at the sane time that Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky were there) where she studied with Angelo Jank and then had further study in Paris until 1907. After her move to Florence in 1907, she became familiar with the tenets and practices of the Futurists, and became intimately involved with two leaders of the movement, F. T. Marinetti and Giovani Papini. Futurism invigorated her aesthetic productions, culminating in her participation in the 1914 Esposizone Libera Futurista Internazionale (First Free Exhibition of International Futurist Art) in Rome. Burke notes that until her years in Paris and Florence helped her become acquainted with contemporary issues in the art world, including the emergence of Cubism and Futurism, "Mina Loy could have been described as a minor Post-Impressionist painter, known chiefly for the elegance of her draughtsmanship and the delicacy of her water-colors' ("Reimagining"). That description, though, may be understated. While living in Florence, she described in a letter to Carl van Vechten during the summer of 1915 (prior to studying drawing in Berlin with Alexander Archipenko) her early training in art:

There is very little to say about Paris-all the drawing I ever learnt was with Angelo Jank in Munich-and I used to take my fantasy drawings to [Maximillian] Dasio's class-who always proclaimed me a genius and told the other poor women to look at this "and go home and darn-["] These appreciations I found in art-schools-used to frighten me-for I never knew how I did anything-and then I began to wonder if I could manage to do it again-and couldn't work for a month-Primet at Calarossis was the only master in Paris that made a fuss of my work-But Paris in those days for everyone meant just learning to love the dear old impressionists-I had Manet and Monet on the spot-but Degas frightened me for a year-and I shall always feel grateful to the day I first "saw" the early Renoirs-But the most beautiful things in Paris were the Fetes-and the Bal Bullier. (qtd in Kouidis 2-3)

Her move from Florence to New York City in 1916 marked, to quote Susan E. Dunn, "her transition from Italian Futurism to New York Dada" ("Opposed"). In New York Loy, who was exemplified as the "modern woman" by the Evening Sun newspaper, became involved personally and artistically with Marcel Duchamp during the social evenings at the apartment of Walter Conrad and Louise Arensberg. Together with Duchamp and others, Loy was one of the organizers of the 1917 Society of Independent Artists at Grand Central Palace. After meeting and eventually marrying the dadaist poet and boxer Arthur Craven, a nephew of Oscar Wilde, Loy made additional moves to Mexico, Chile, and Argentina. Following the dissappearance and apparent death of Craven, Loy went back to Europe (Surrey, Geneva, and Florence) and returned to New York in 1920. The following year she again made her way back to Europe, going to Paris, Florence, Austria, Berlin and then to Paris again for an extended stay where she encountered surrealism and worked as the Paris representative for the Julien Levy Gallery from 1932 to 1936. In her capacity as gallery representative, she commissioned work from Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Georgio de Chirico, Alberto Giacometti, and others. She lived, all together, almost twenty years in Paris, a time when she became familiar with Brancusi and Pascin and their work. In 1937 she returned to the United States. During her years of living in New York city she became an intimate friend, as well as an aesthetic and spiritual adviser of sorts, of Joseph Cornell. In New York and later Aspen, Loy worked predominantly on making constructions from the garbage and refuse that she gleaned from the streets.

In her lifetime she had friends and acquaintances in both literary and artistic circles, including Symbolists, Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealists, feminists, conceptualists, modernists, and post-modernists. A list of her friends and acquaintances reads like a who's who of modernism: Bernice Abbot, Margaret Anderson, Guillaume Appolinaire, Louis Aragon, Walter Conrad and Louise Arensberg, Alexander Archipenko, Djuna Barnes, Natalie Barnes, Sylvia Beach, Paul Blackburn, Kay Boyle, Constantin Brancusi, Andre Breton, Basil Bunting, Marc Chagall, Colette, Padraic Colum, Nancy Cunnard, Joseph Cornell, Arthur Craven, Salvador Dali, Dorothy Day, Charles Demuth, Mabel Dodge, Mariel Draper, Marcell Duchamp, Isadora Duncan, Max Ernst, Ford Maddox Ford, Sigmond Freud, Baroness Elsa von Frytag-Loringhoven, Peggy Guggenheim, Marsden Hartley, Jane Heap, Ernest Hemingway, Angus John, James Joyce, Angelo Jank, Alfred Kreymborg, Julian Levy, James Laughlin, Wyndham Lewis, F. T. Marienetti, Robert McAlmon, Henry McBride, Thomas Merton, Marianne Moore, Richard Oelze, Eugene O'Neil, Jules Pascin, Giovanni Papini, Frances Picabia, Ezra Pound, John Quinn, Man Ray, John Reed, Lola Ridge, Auguste Rodin, Arthur Rubenstein, Charles Sheeler, Alfred Steiglitz, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Scofield Thayer, Virgil Thomson, Tristen Tzara, Laurence Vail, Edgar Varese, Carl van Vechten, William Carlos Williams, and many others. Loy believed firmly that individuals, like these, had a responsibility because of their genius to use their various arts to expand human consciousness. For Loy, these geniuses-the modern artists, writers, and thinkers-were a new priestly class and possessors of divine power. From the beginning of her career, her work displayed leanings toward mysticism as she came to believe that she and the other "geniuses" must learn "to trust the immediacy of conscious perception and to recognize that it was the artists' task to record the dynamic movement of the mind as it interacted with the sensuous world" (Galvin 61). This attentiveness to the movements of the mind led Loy in her poetry and visual arts to pursue those sites where consciousness, language, corporeality, and identity interrelated with new forms of poetic and artistic expression. Human consciousness was for Loy an agent for radical social change, and her role as poet and artist-shaped in part by her associations with Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism, as well as Brancusi, Duchamp, Pascin, and Cornell-was to support changes in consciousness.