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Whisper, The Waves, The Wind

Suzanne Lacy

1986 00:28:25 United StatesEnglishColorMono4:3Video
Tags:
Aging, Artist Portraits, Feminism, Performance

Description

In today’s youth-oriented society, the experience and knowledge of older women is typically unheralded and neglected. Countering these ideas is Suzanne Lacy’s Whisper, The Waves, The Wind—a performance evoking and reinforcing the strong spiritual and physical beauty of older women. Lacy says, “They reminded me of the place where the ocean meets shoreline. Their bodies were growing older, wrinkled. But what I saw was the rock in them; solid, with the presence of the years washing over them.” This tape is a document of that performance.

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.