Suzanne Lacy: Gender Agendas

Published to accompany the exhibition Gender Agendas at Museo Pecci Milano, this book covers Suzanne Lacy’s whole career, presenting a selection of her major projects: from the pioneering Prostitution Notes (1974), an artwork that combines conceptual and performance art with social commitment focused on the theme of prostitution exploitation in some areas of Los Angeles, to Crystal Quilt (1985-1987), probably Lacy’s most famous work, a huge performance which involved 430 women over 60 seated at tables arranged in the pattern of a large quilt created by Miriam Shapiro, mingling their memories with sociological analyses of society’s failure to exploit the potential of old age, to Storing Rape (2012), a discussion among important media personalities, activists and politicians in the attempt to find a different way of describing sexual violence. Suzanne Lacy is an artist of fundamental importance for the development of art in the last few decades, the curator of the exhibition and Director of Museo Pecci Fabio Cavallucci writes in his contribution to the catalogue. In the first place, she has challenged the basic principle of the tradition of creative production, i.e. the monolithic figure of the artist. Since the 1970s, Lacy has preferred the model of the conductor, primus inter pares, whose main aim is to activate a system of collaborations, to that of the single artist, the solitary demiurge who creates work thanks to a superior intuition. Her works are generally the result of multi-layered cooperative activity: with other artists, various institutions, associations or groups, with whom she shares the creation of the project, and obviously also its authorship.