Since the 1970s, the performance and conceptual artist Suzanne Lacy has explored women’s lives and experiences, as well as race, ethnicity, aging, economic disparities, and violence, through her pioneering community-based art. Combining aesthetics and politics, and often collaborating with other artists and community organizations, she has staged large-scale public art projects, sometimes involving hundreds of participants. 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, Leaving Art 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.
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction. Suzanne Lacy: Three Decades of Performing and Writing/Writing and Performing
- Part 1 . Learning to Look: The Seventies
- Introduction
- 1. Prostitution Notes (1974)
- 2. Falling Apart (1980)
- 3. Body Contract (1974)
- Photo Essay. Learn Where the Meat Comes From (1976)
- 4. Cinderella in a Dragster (1977)
- 5. The Bag Lady: On Memory (1982)
- 6. The Life and Times of Donaldina Cameron (with Linda Palumbo and Kathleen Chang) (1978)
- 7. In Mourning and In Rage (With Analysis Aforethought) (1978)
- 8. Learning to Look: The Relationship between Art and Popular Culture Images (with Leslie Labowitz) (1979)
- 9. Feminist Artists: Developing a Media Strategy for the Movement (with Leslie Labowitz) (1981)
- 10. Time, Bones, and Art: Anatomy of a Decade (1995)
- Part 2 . Political Performance Art: The Eighties
- Introduction
- 11. Broomsticks and Banners: The Winds of Change (1980)
- 12. The Greening of California Performance: Art for Social Change—A Case Study (1982)
- 13. Made for TV: California Performance in Mass Media (1982)
- 14. Battle of New Orleans (1980)
- 15. Beneath the Seams (1982)
- 16. In the Shadows: An Analysis of The Dark Madonna (1990)
- 17. Political Performance Art: A Discussion by Suzanne Lacy and Lucy R. Lippard (1985)
- Part 3 . Debated Territory: The Nineties
- Introduction
- 18. The Name of the Game (1991)
- 19. Debated Territory: Toward a Critical Language for Public Art (1994)
- 20. Affinities: Thoughts on an Incomplete History (1994)
- 21. Love, Cancer, Memory: A Few Stories (1996)
- 22. Cancer Notes (with Leslie Becker) (1995)
- 23. What It Takes (with Ann Wettrich) (2002)
- Part 4 . Leaving Art: After 2000
- Introduction
- 24. The Skin of Memory/La Piel de la Memoria (with Pilar Riaño- Alcalá) (2006)
- 25. Seeking an American Identity (Working inward from the Margins) (2003)
- 26. Cop in the Head, Cop in the Street (2006)
- 27. Having It Good: Reflections on Engaged Art and Engaged Buddhism (2005)
- 28. Hard Work in a Working- Class Town (2006)
- 29. Tracing Allan Kaprow (2007)
- Afterword: In | ter | ceptions and In | tensions—Situating Suzanne Lacy’s Practice
- Appendix: Chronology and Selected Performances and Installations
- Notes
- Index
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