Suzanne Lacy: Spaces Between

By Sharon Irish Often controversial and sometimes even shocking to audiences, the work of California-based artist Suzanne Lacy has challenged viewers and participants with personal accounts of traumatic events, settings that require people to assume uncomfortable positions, multisensory productions that evoke emotional as well as intellectual responses, and even flayed lambs and beef kidneys. Lacy has experimented with ways to claim the power of mass media, to use women’s consciousness-raising groups as a performance structure, and to connect her projects to lived experiences. The body and large groups of bodies are the locations for her lifelike art, revealing the aesthetics of relationships among people. In this critical examination of Suzanne Lacy, Sharon Irish surveys Lacy’s art from 1972 to the present, demonstrating the pivotal roles that Lacy has had in public art, feminist theory, and community organizing. Lacy initially used her own body—or animal organs—to visually depict psy