ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Suzanne Lacy is an internationally known artist whose work includes installations, video, and large-scale performances on social themes and urban issues. She is also chair of the Master in Fine Arts in Public Practice program at Otis College of Art and Design. Lacy edited the collection Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art and has published more than seventy articles on public and performance art.

REVIEWS

“For nearly 40 years Ms. Lacy’s collaborative, community-based art projects, some involving hundreds of people, have been grappling with matters of race, class and possible social change with a hands-on audacity that few artists can match. This book, with a persuasive introduction by the artist-historian Moira Roth, at last puts Ms. Lacy’s own fluent accounts of her life and work between covers. The result is a moving and feisty document of a committed life, one that students of the art of our time will be grateful for in the years ahead.” - Holland Cotter, New York Times

“Reflection in and on the present moment–rather than a concern for prestige or posterity–defines and sets apart Lacy’s experimental documents as in some way ‘live’ themselves, making Leaving Art a strong resource for public and live artists working now.” - Becky Hunter, Whitehot Magazine

“The book, then, performs best as an archive of methods. One text explicitly
outlines how to develop a media strategy for a feminist campaign, with excellent practical tips on structuring an event and how to convey its meaning to the media. But, more subliminally, we can gauge throughout how certainty wavers and how uncertainty, when viewed in retrospect, is ultimately productive.” - Sally O’Reilly, Art Monthly

“Lacy remains close in spirit to the feminism that emerged in the late '60s. Many of her most significant performances directly addressed women's issues, especially rape, prostitution, pornography and physical aging. With a canny understanding of mass communications. Lacy calibrated her staged actions to garner media attention, and to be readily comprehensible to those outside the art world. One of the most consistent elements of her activity is its emphasis on forming multiracial alliances under the banner of ‘Women.’” - Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Art in America

“As both artist and theorist, Suzanne Lacy has pioneered the field of collaborative and socially engaged art. Over the past several decades, she has refigured artistic practice as a means for the production of new publics. This book is an incomparable toolbox for anyone seeking a renewal of art’s social and political potential today.”—Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery, London

“Suzanne Lacy is the most important public artist working today, in part because she is also an inspired organizer, writer, and public intellectual. Multicultural and multicentered, and devoted to civic dialogue, she balances esthetics and politics, pragmatics and imagination, while collaborating with those living inside the issues. Her feminist energy infuses this book. It will turn many heads.”—Lucy R. Lippard, author of The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Feminist Essays on Art

“Suzanne Lacy’s work is a communal improvisation inviting life to happen in all its drama, absurdity, pain, and danger. At its best, it has the passion and complexity of Action Painting.”—Eleanor Antin, artist and Professor Emeritus, University of California, San Diego

“For nearly 40 years Ms. Lacy’s collaborative, community-based art projects, some involving hundreds of people, have been grappling with matters of race, class and possible social change with a hands-on audacity that few artists can match. This book, with a persuasive introduction by the artist-historian Moira Roth, at last puts Ms. Lacy’s own fluent accounts of her life and work between covers. The result is a moving and feisty document of a committed life, one that students of the art of our time will be grateful for in the years ahead.”

-- Holland Cotter New York Times

“Lacy remains close in spirit to the feminism that emerged in the late '60s. Many of her most significant performances directly addressed women's issues, especially rape, prostitution, pornography and physical aging. With a canny understanding of mass communications. Lacy calibrated her staged actions to garner media attention, and to be readily comprehensible to those outside the art world. One of the most consistent elements of her activity is its emphasis on forming multiracial alliances under the banner of ‘Women.’”

-- Abigail Solomon-Godeau Art in America

“Reflection in and on the present moment–rather than a concern for prestige or posterity–defines and sets apart Lacy’s experimental documents as in some way ‘live’ themselves, making Leaving Art a strong resource for public and live artists working now.”

-- Becky Hunter Whitehot Magazine

“The book, then, performs best as an archive of methods. One text explicitly
outlines how to develop a media strategy for a feminist campaign, with excellent practical tips on structuring an event and how to convey its meaning to the media. But, more subliminally, we can gauge throughout how certainty wavers and how uncertainty, when viewed in retrospect, is ultimately productive.”

-- Sally O’Reilly Art Monthly

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Dark Madonna

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