Suzanne Lacy

Suzanne Lacy (born 1945) is an American artist, educator, and writer. She has worked in a variety of media, including installation, video, performance, public art, photography, and art books, in which she focuses on "social themes and urban issues."^[1] She served in the education cabinet of Jerry Brown, then mayor of Oakland, California, and as arts commissioner for the city.^[1][2] She designed multiple educational programs beginning with her role as performance faculty at The Feminist Studio Workshop at The Woman's Building in Los Angeles.

Performance art

In 1977, Lacy and collaborator Leslie Labowitz combined performance art with activism in Three Weeks in May.^[3] The event included a performance piece on the steps of Los Angeles City Hall and self-defense classes for women in an attempt to highlight and curb sexual violence against women.^[3] The artists updated a map with reports from the Los Angeles Police Department, printing the word "rape" on spots on a map of the greater Los Angeles Area.^[4] Lacy and Labowitz teamed up with Bia Lowe, and other artists, in 1977 to create, In Mourning and In Rage, a large-scale public protest performance. It had been designed to challenge media coverage that sensationalized a rash of murders of women by the so-called Hillside Strangler; the tone of the press coverage seemed geared to heighten the climate of fear which reinforced the image of women as victims. The performance began when a group of exceptionally tall women, made taller by towering black headpieces, arrived at City Hall in a hearse, followed by a caravan of cars filled with women in black. The Performers debarked and formed a circle in front of the steps of City Hall, beneath a banner that read, ”In memory of our sisters, women fight back.” The artist's designed the performance, action and imagery, specifically to captivate the interest of television news; and, in successfully achieving this network coverage, used the media to critique itself -- which extended the impact of the art performance far beyond the usual feminist and/or art audience.^[5] Participants from the Woman’s Building, the Rape Hotline Alliance, and City Council joined with the feminist community and families of the victims in creating a public ritual of rage as well as grief. ^[1] Lacy and Labowitz founded Ariadne: A Social Art Network, a collaborative group to create community-based artwork and educational opportunities.^[6] In the mid-seventies, Lacy curated the first exhibition of women's performance art at Womanspace Gallery at The Woman's Building. In 1981, she collaborated with Susan Hiller to curate the exhibition We'll Think of a Title When We Meet: Women Performance Artists from London and Los Angeles at Franklin Furnace, a well-known alternative arts venue founded in 1976 by Martha Wilson.^[7]

Lacy produced many performances in various sites around the world, mostly focusing on race, class and gender equity. During the first two decades of the 2000, she reworked earlier performances, including WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, based upon the venues and objectives. In 2012, she re-created the 1977 performance for the Getty Pacific Standard Time Performance Festival. Three Weeks in January, was an anti-rape performance based on her landmark 1977 project; this time the map was installed prominently on the Los Angeles Police Department's main campus.^[8]

Whisper, the Waves, the Wind, created with Sharon Allen in 1984, was the culmination of the Whisper Project, a yearlong series of events that highlighted the special needs of older women. ""I'm interested in the mythology surrounding older women," Lacy responded when being interviewed about her work,"in how they are denuded of their power in our culture. I want to help them overcome the barriers set up by prejudice, by the accumulation of wealth and power. I want to reinfuse them with their power and realized how right and evocative the sea was as a setting. With all its cycles, I think people will get the feeling whether they understand it or not, that sense of continuity in matriarchal consciousness." ^[9] On the morning of the performance a procession of 154 ethnically-diverse older women (between the ages of 65 to 99) all dressed in white, moving slowly down a staircase to the vast beach below. They sat in groups of four, at white cloth-covered tables on two adjacent beaches at Children's Pool in La Jolla. Their animated conversations focused on pre-selected topics -- their thoughts about the physical process of aging; preparing for death; loss; the women's movement; what advice they would give to younger women." The audience watched and listened from the cliffs high above the beach where they could hear a collage of the women’s voices piped through speakers, managed by sound composer Susan Stone. ^[10] "From the whisper of women's voices on a beach to a shout of rage on the steps of City Hall, Suzanne Lacy's art is one of alchemy and exorcism, celebration and condemnation" wrote Margot Mifflin in her interview with Suzanne Lacy about the performance.^[11]

On Mother's Day, May 10, 1987, Lacy directed the hour-long "Crystal Quilt", a sequel to Whisper, the Waves, the Wind. This time, however, the performance was staged indoors, in what is known as the Crystal Court (a space normally occupied by kiosks and a café) in the IDS Center, a downtown Minneapolis skyscraper designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee. The Crystal Quilt was the most ambitions and most complex of all of Lacy's 1980's vivant, as she often describes these grand, large-scale productions. ^[12]The Crystal Quilt, which featured 430 older women.^[13] Filmed at IDS Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota and broadcast live on PBS, the performance involved "women talking about their lives as their gathering created an eighty-two foot square tableau in the shape of a quilt."^[14] The performance was attended by over 3,000 people.

Lacy believes that her work cannot be re-enacted literally based on its immediate response to specific times and places. However, as many issues remain current it is possible to "re-think" works in new contexts. Like Crystal Quilt, Silver Action concerns older women, a re-creation produced for the opening of The Tanks performance space at Tate Modern. Silver Action took place in February 2013 at the Tate Modern Gallery in London and featured 400 women over the age of 60 discussing activism regarding women's rights: their past participation, the future, and how their views have changed as they matured.^[15]

Between 1991 and 2001, Lacy staged The Oakland Projects, a community performance art project, with TEAM (Teens, Educators, Artists, Media Makers) members. The Oakland Projects aimed to engage local California youth in consciousness-raising discussions about police brutality, social injustice, education, and other social issues. Participants did not ‘perform’ in the traditional sense, but instead mirrored the social stereotypes that they see within in their community.^[16] The Roof is On Fire (1993–1994) was a two-year project in which Lacy and collaborators developed media literacy classes for Oakland youth, and conducted a one-night performance piece. More than 200 young people had conversations in cars about race, class, gender, inequality, and other issues. Observers were asked to listen in on the conversations. The students trained in independent media created a documentary of the performance, which was covered on mainstream news stations.^[17]

In 2012, Lacy modified her earlier work Three Weeks in May (1977) for a new project called Three Weeks in January, which continued the dialogue about rape in Los Angeles. It included presentations, conversations, and a performance called Storying Rape. Storying Rape: Shame Ends Here grew into another art project produced for the Liverpool Biennial in 2012, which promoted a public conversation in the English city about rape violence, education, and prevention.^[18]

In October 2013, Lacy organizations conversations among women on the stoops of Park Place houses in Brooklyn, New York, for her Between the Door and the Street Project. Sponsored by the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, 360 participants discussed gender issues while passersbys listened in.^[19]

Writing

Lacy is the editor of Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, an anthology of essays about the impact of performance art in public spaces.^[20][21] She has also written articles on performance art.^[22]

Suzanne Lacy has consistently written about her work: planning, describing, and analyzing it; advocating socially engaged art practices; theorizing the relationship between art and social intervention; and questioning the boundaries separating high art from popular participation. By bringing together thirty texts that Lacy has written since 1974, Lacy's Book,^[23] offers an intimate look at the development of feminist, conceptual, and performance art since those movements’ formative years. In the introduction, the art historian Moira Roth provides a helpful overview of Lacy’s art and writing, which in the afterword the cultural theorist Kerstin Mey situates in relation to contemporary public art practices.

Academia

Lacy has held several positions at academic institutions focusing on the arts. She was the Dean of Fine Arts at California College of the Arts (CCA) from 1987-1997.^[1][24] Lacy was a founding faculty member at California State University, Monterey Bay^[24] and founding director of the Center for Fine Art and Public Life.^[24] She served as the Chair of Fine Arts at Otis College of Art and Design from 2002–2006, before designing and launching a Master of Fine Arts program in Public Practice for the college in 2007.^[25]

Recognition

Lacy has won numerous fellowships, including several from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Lila Wallace Arts International Fellowship.^[26] She was the first recipient of the Public Art Dialogue Annual Award in 2009.^[27] She received the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement from the College Art Association in 2010 and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women's Caucus for Art in 2012.^[28][29]

Collections

Her work is owned by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles "Prostitution Notes" and The Tate Modern "The Crystal Quilt." In 2012, the Hammer Museum acquired Three Weeks in May (1977).^[4]

References

External links

• Suzanne Lacy's website
• Suzanne Lacy on the Feminist Program at Fresno State and CalArts, by Moira Roth

External video

Suzanne Lacy in the Video Data Bank

A Conversation with Judy Chicago and Suzanne Lacy on YouTube

Woman's Building History: Suzanne Lacy (Otis College) on YouTube

In Mourning and In Rage performance on YouTube