Suzanne Lacy
Lecture
Suzanne Lacy is a performance artist and writer whose work includes large-scale public performances and installations, photographs and text on issues of social justice and equity.
Lacy began making performances in the mid-seventies in Los Angeles, coming of age as an artist among colleagues such as Barbara Smith, Paul McCarthy, Rachel Rosenthal, Susan Mogul, and Martha Rosler. Since then, she has become a proponent of audience engagement and artists' roles in shaping public agendas. Her work is reported on television news as often as reviewed in art texts. She lectures widely, has published over 70 articles, exhibited internationally, and been reviewed in the L.A. Times, the New York Times, Art in America, and numerous books. Her fellowships include the Guggenheim Foundation, The Surdna Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her book, Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (1995), was responsible for coining the term and articulating the practice.
Most recently Lacy received the Henry Moore Fellowship in Great Britain. She is working on a collection of essays for Duke University Press entitled Leaving Art: Performances, Politics, and Publics, and is developing a book describing her ten-year series of performances with youth in Oakland, California for the On the Edge research programme at Gray’s College of Art in Aberdeen, Scotland.