front cover of Leaving Art
Leaving Art
Writings on Performance, Politics, and Publics, 1974-2007
Suzanne Lacy
Duke University Press, 2010
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.
[more]

front cover of Mobilizing Pedagogy
Mobilizing Pedagogy
Two Social Practice Projects in the Americas by Pablo Helguera with Suzanne Lacy and Pilar Riaño-Alcalá
Edited by Elyse A. Gonzales and Sara Reisman
Amherst College Press, 2018
What is—what should be—the place of art in society? Is it merely decorative? Is it only to affirm a given set of cultural preferences? Or should it examine, challenge, even upend these norms to bring open new perspectives for those who experience what artists create?

Social practice artists offer a clear and unflinching answer to this question, setting before us works intended not merely to ask questions but to propose pathways toward large societal change.

In this volume, the work of two social practice artists of different generations and different social locations—Suzanne Lacy and Pablo Helguera—are brought into creative tension by two visionary curators: Elyse A. Gonzalez of the Art, Design & Architecture Museum of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Sara Reisman of the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation of New York. Working together, Gonzales and Reisman bring the work of these two engaged and activist artists into dialogue, showing how art can be not merely the mirror of society but the means of making it more just, more inclusive, and more humane.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter