What do you think?
Rate this book
Suzanne Lacy: We Are Here
This generously illustrated book sheds light on the groundbreaking career of Suzanne Lacy, an artist, writer, and educator whose participatory, socially engaged performances helped define social practice art and continue to resonate with many of the most pressing issues in American culture.
Over the past five decades the genre-defying art of Suzanne Lacy has taken multiple forms, spanning performance, sculpture and video installations, and photography. Organizing public encounters that emphasize intensive community dialogue and collaborative choreography, Lacy has explored many political and social contexts that remain deeply relevant--including race, class, and gender equity; ageism; and violence against women. This record of Lacy's career is anchored by an extensively illustrated survey of selected works that groups related projects and illuminates their core themes and approaches. Featuring photographs, stills, ephemera, and other primary documentation, this section incorporates a selection of reprinted texts and newly commissioned first-person accounts by Lacy's collaborators, a group that includes critics and artists such as Judy Chicago, Allan Kaprow, Andrea Bowers, Moira Roth, and Lucy Lippard. Extensive, penetrating, and visually compelling, this long-awaited monograph documents the bold career of an artist whose profound attentiveness to social dynamics, politics, and context continues to provoke and inspire today.
Copublished by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and DelMonico Books
Over the past five decades the genre-defying art of Suzanne Lacy has taken multiple forms, spanning performance, sculpture and video installations, and photography. Organizing public encounters that emphasize intensive community dialogue and collaborative choreography, Lacy has explored many political and social contexts that remain deeply relevant--including race, class, and gender equity; ageism; and violence against women. This record of Lacy's career is anchored by an extensively illustrated survey of selected works that groups related projects and illuminates their core themes and approaches. Featuring photographs, stills, ephemera, and other primary documentation, this section incorporates a selection of reprinted texts and newly commissioned first-person accounts by Lacy's collaborators, a group that includes critics and artists such as Judy Chicago, Allan Kaprow, Andrea Bowers, Moira Roth, and Lucy Lippard. Extensive, penetrating, and visually compelling, this long-awaited monograph documents the bold career of an artist whose profound attentiveness to social dynamics, politics, and context continues to provoke and inspire today.
Copublished by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and DelMonico Books
- GenresArt
268 pages, Hardcover
Published March 4, 2019
9 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 6, 2019
Suzanne Lacy's work really might be one-of-a-kind. Blurring the line between performance and activism, some might even be hard pressed to label her an "artist", exactly, as much as an organizer, but I definitely left the exhibit feeling that I had experienced a powerfully artistic encounter.
Her early work from the 1970s is, at this point, the easiest to categorize. We would now call these pieces "video" or "conceptual" art. With its feminist critique of women's self-image of their bodies, these works are somewhat reminiscent of those of contemporary Eleanor Antin. Like Antin's work, Lacy's militant feminist pieces stand out from the crowd of such 1970s work by their effective use of humor.
Her later work, Prostitution Notes, blurs the lines between art and journalism. Lacy transcribed interviews with sex workers, pimps, and johns onto a series of canvases. The work ultimately makes everyone involved in the sex trade, with the possible exception of cops, seem vulnerable and human.
Lacy becomes an increasingly humorless artist, but this does not make her later work any less powerful. In the 1980s, '90s and early 2000s she organized sites of discourse for women, especially senior women, to express their hopes, concerns and fears to one another. Sometimes, the participants would dress in special outfits, creating tangible "scenes" that were recorded by photograph and decorative notes the participants made.
The latest work on display in the exhibit, 2017's multi-channel video piece, The Circle and the Square, shows Lacy fully embracing the messianic role she had started to create for herself in the previous decades. Various ethnic groups living in a fading factory town in England discuss their lives while sitting in an abandoned factory and sing songs of their traditional culture. Gradually, the songs and voices become one mesmerizingly affirmational sound. Is the work preachy? Oh, yes. Is it powerful? Extremely.
Her early work from the 1970s is, at this point, the easiest to categorize. We would now call these pieces "video" or "conceptual" art. With its feminist critique of women's self-image of their bodies, these works are somewhat reminiscent of those of contemporary Eleanor Antin. Like Antin's work, Lacy's militant feminist pieces stand out from the crowd of such 1970s work by their effective use of humor.
Her later work, Prostitution Notes, blurs the lines between art and journalism. Lacy transcribed interviews with sex workers, pimps, and johns onto a series of canvases. The work ultimately makes everyone involved in the sex trade, with the possible exception of cops, seem vulnerable and human.
Lacy becomes an increasingly humorless artist, but this does not make her later work any less powerful. In the 1980s, '90s and early 2000s she organized sites of discourse for women, especially senior women, to express their hopes, concerns and fears to one another. Sometimes, the participants would dress in special outfits, creating tangible "scenes" that were recorded by photograph and decorative notes the participants made.
The latest work on display in the exhibit, 2017's multi-channel video piece, The Circle and the Square, shows Lacy fully embracing the messianic role she had started to create for herself in the previous decades. Various ethnic groups living in a fading factory town in England discuss their lives while sitting in an abandoned factory and sing songs of their traditional culture. Gradually, the songs and voices become one mesmerizingly affirmational sound. Is the work preachy? Oh, yes. Is it powerful? Extremely.
November 2, 2020
This is one of the best artist books I have read. Incredibly comprehensive of Lacy's diverse work, ranging her whole career. I love the sketchbook pages and planning maps included. I highly recommend this to anyone who wants to explore Socially Engaged Art in practice (rather than in theory).
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews