Since the 1970s, the performance and conceptual
artist Suzanne Lacy has explored women's experiences,
violence, race, ethnicity, aging, and economic
disparities through her pioneering work. 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. She 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. Leaving Art brings
together thirty pieces that Lacy has written since 1974.
In different ways, each one relates to questions arising
during performances and installations, although five
were written as scripts or artworks. The chronological
arrangement of the pieces reveals Lacy's intense focus
on questions of gender, violence, and the body during
the 1970s, and her turn in the 1980s toward political
performance art and questions about how the media could
be used by artists to instigate social change. Lacy
later engaged questions of race relations, criminal
justice, and education in the 1990s, developing
community art initiatives designed to spark substantive
discussion about charged social and political issues.
More recently, in her reflections on what art is and
should be now, she has compared socially engaged public
art with Buddhist practices, and examined the influence
of one of her mentors, the late Allan Kaprow, on the
development of feminist performance art in the 1970s.
Leaving Art includes an introduction to Lacy's art and
writing by Moira Roth, and an afterword in which Kerstin
Mey situates Lacy's work in relation to contemporary
cultural theory and practice.
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