Skip to main content

SOFA

Suzanne Lacy

1984 00:22:50 United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:3Video
Tags:
Documentary, Feminism, Gender, Performance, Politics

Description

Executive Producer, Suzanne Lacy; Director, Steve Hirsch; Editor, Doug Gayeton.

From the performance Freeze Frame: Room for Living Room by Suzanne Lacy, Julia London, Ngoh Spencer, and Carol Leigh, San Francisco, 1982.

A tableau performance featuring 120 women staged in groups of varying ages, occupations, and races, in an upscale furniture showroom in the San Francisco warehouse district. The women talked between themselves about survival before an audience that wandered from scene to scene to eavesdrop. As a final act, the performers gathered in one room to relate personal experiences about stereotypes, pride, belonging and exclusion--the first time during the performance that they spoke directly to the audience.

The performance was a six-month effort to bring together representatives of San Francisco’s diverse female population for conversations centering on their social circumstances, similarities, and differences. This site-specific performance was presented for the International Sculpture Conference. 

About Suzanne Lacy

Suzanne Lacy is unique in drawing the world into collaboration with her work while maintaining an individual vision. Although art is often conceived and realized as a private act, in Lacy’s work the performance becomes a frame in which many people create personal expressions in relationship to a common issue. A pioneer in socially interactive, feminist public art, Lacy’s large-scale performances have, since the mid-'70s, engaged mass audiences through media and complicated community organizing.  

Also known for her writing, Lacy edited the influential Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, published in 1995 by Bay Press, and Leaving Art: Writings on Performance, Politics, and Publics, 1974–2007, published in 2010 by Duke University Press. She is the Chair of the Graduate Public Practice Program at Otis College of Art and Design, in Los Angeles.