Awards
2010 Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
Suzanne Lacy
Suzanne Lacy (center) confers with Lucy R. Lippard (far left) and Moira Roth on the set of The Crystal Quilt, her performance in Minneapolis in 1987, while Larry Fink photographs the arrival of performers (photograph by Linda Brooks)
The continuum of Suzanne Lacy’s career mirrors the history of contemporary art: performance, installation, video, activism, social practice, and public engagement. An internationally regarded artist, Lacy has addressed issues of sexual violence, aging, incarceration, illness, poverty, and a range of social-justice issues for almost four decades. Beginning in the early 1970s as a student at the University of California, Fresno, and then in the Feminist Art Program at California Institute for the Arts, she was an integral and pioneering member of the Women’s Studio Workshop, Woman’s Building, and other important landmarks of feminist art. Since then, Lacy has maintained a career resolute in its commitment to feminism and social change. Her work was introduced to new audiences in 2007 by WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution. A friend of and collaborator with Allan Kaprow, Lacy most recently cocurated many of his performance “re-dos” in conjunction with his 2008 retrospective.
Nominators were eloquent in their assessment of Lacy’s impact as artist, collaborator, teacher, colleague, role model, and critical thinker, citing her work of the 1970s dealing with sexual violence and rape (Ablutions, Three Weeks in May, and Mourning and Rage); her 1987 performance in Minneapolis, The Crystal Quilt, which engaged over four hundred older women; and her work in the 1990s with teams of artists and young people addressing youth and public policy. With recent work addressing post-Katrina housing, Appalachian poverty, conditions in the San Joaquin Valley, or connecting younger generations of women artists with the history of feminism, Lacy has continued to relate to a public well beyond the art world.
Few artists attempt work of the magnitude of Lacy’s. Fewer still successfully translate early art activism into a lifetime creative practice. Accomplished in art making, critical thinking, organizing, teaching, and writing, she is this year’s Distinguished Artist for Lifetime Achievement.
Jury: Stephanie Barron, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, chair; Hannah Higgins, University of Illinois, Chicago; and Alison de Lima Green, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
