The best way to describe my work,
I think, is, to talk about a work, itself.
It might be flying through the air, nude, on a beach,
in a photograph - or it could be three hundred
and fifty men in the middle of a bullring in Ecuador,
reading letters on violence against women.
My name is Suzanne Lacy, and I’m an artist,
and a professor and a writer.
I’m an artist-activist, but I would say for me,
the emphasis has always been on the art.
Social practice art is a relatively new term.
Social practice encompasses activities that take place
outside of the studio; they’re activities that take
place often in public, and be likely to involve some
kind of social or political issue.
My work can encompass a variety of medium.
I usually select the medium based on what the idea is:
photography, video, performance art, community
organizing, collation building.
My practice is based more on experimentation and concept
than it is on any kind of material.
The one material that I work in is time.
Every work I do starts with some kind of question,
and one of the questions I’m interested in is how you
construct a public sphere through art.
That was another myth that the feminist art movement
tried to explode: the idea of the solitary genius, alone
in, normally his studio, creating reality.
I work very much as part of public process
of conversation, relationship building
and collaboration.
We are here in memory of all women, who
have been, and are being,
battered, raped and killed throughout this country.
Collaboration was foregrounded by women who
were attempting to create more equality in terms
of who got to make art, who got to see art,
and who participated in art.
I consider my work feminist to the core.
In the seventies, to say you were a feminist
was not a badge of honor.
It was a statement, an assertation
of your political views in spite of a lot of backlash.
Performance, political activism and art have been going
on for centuries,
and I think there are times when society needs it,
I think there are times, like now, when
the social sphere is such that people want
to reengage and to challenge political structures.
So I think that it’s pretty inevitable that young people
in art schools are going to want to know how they can
make an impact on the world.