CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – The work of controversial artist Suzanne Lacy defies simple categorization. Sometimes described as performance art, feminist art or political art, it encompasses all those categories but fits neatly into none of them.
In a new book, “Suzanne Lacy: Spaces Between” (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), the first in-depth examination of the artist and her art, author Sharon Irish traces Lacy’s evolution as an artist-activist and the societal contexts surrounding her work.
Irish, who is the interim director of the Community Informatics Initiative and holds appointments in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science and the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois, based her book on interviews with the artist and more than 50 of Lacy’s collaborators. Irish also accompanied Lacy on a project in Kentucky, visited many of the sites where performances were staged and combed through stacks of archival information – including boxes of papers in Lacy’s garage.
Since Lacy began working as an artist in the 1970s, her art has comprised books, photography, collage and performance pieces that have ranged from a few people to citywide projects involving extensive preparation and hundreds of people. Startling images such as animal carcasses and animal organs nailed to walls, mutilated human bodies, animal blood and women in black wearing headdresses shaped like coffins were used in early works to evoke strong emotions about taboo and intractable societal problems such as rape, violence and murder.
“Suzanne is a feminist, and feminism is a term that is dismissed more these days,” Irish said. “To me, the way that Suzanne’s work is informed by feminism means that she sees the relationships among people as political and that feminism is a way of building coalitions among women, but also underrepresented or marginalized people, to gain power and that she’s really trying to address with her feminist politics, more just and equitable ways of being in the world.”
As important as the art itself, Irish believes, are the urban spaces that Lacy chooses to frame her work, which have ranged from the steps of Los Angeles’ City Hall for a mock funeral that protested salacious media stories about victims of the Hillside Strangler, to downtown Chicago for an installation of 100 limestone boulders that honored past and current female leaders for their public service.
One of Lacy’s “most significant contributions is making art in the spaces between” – between public spaces and observers, between media depictions and everyday life, and between self and others, Irish wrote.
Using the public stage and the mass media as an observer, Lacy and her collaborators broadened awareness not only of their art but also of the societal injustices and issues that spawned it.
Perhaps Lacy may be best known, at the least in the U.S., for her 1987 performance piece “The Crystal Quilt,” which used 430 women over the age of 60 to address media portrayals of older women and women’s untapped potential. In the atrium of a Minneapolis skyscraper, the participants were seated in groups of four at tables that were arranged to form a quilt pattern designed by painter Miriam Shapiro. The women varied the pattern of the quilt by moving their hands. Performed on Mother’s Day and broadcast live on public television before 3,000 observers, the “living quilt” interwove performers’ personal reflections with societal analysis about aging.
“That was a very successful effort to engage a wide range of policymakers and decision makers in looking at how older women could be leaders in the state of Minnesota,” Irish said.
“People bring powerful emotional agendas to things and then see Suzanne as either contributing to a really important public dialogue or see her as exploiting (people)…” Irish said. “It’s tough work, and therefore controversial.”
In February, Lacy was named the first recipient of the College Art Association’s Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Irish will discuss her book and sign copies at 7 p.m. March 17 in the Lewis Auditorium of the Urbana Free Library, 210 W. Green St., Urbana.
A Creative Research Award from the College of Fine and Applied Arts supported publication of the book.
