Suzanne Lacy is a pioneer of socially engaged public performance art. Her installations, videos, and performances deal with sexual violence, rural and urban poverty, incarceration, labor, and aging. Lacy’s large-scale projects span the globe, including England, Colombia, Ecuador, Spain, Ireland, and the US.
In 2019, she had a career retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and an important installation of her videos in 2021 at The Whitworth in Manchester. Her work has been reviewed in Frieze Magazine, Artforum, LA Times, New York Times, Art in America, Hyper-Allergic and The Guardian. She has exhibited at Tate Modern, The Museum of Contemporary Art LA, the Whitney Museum, Queens Museum, The Contemporary Art Center of Andalusia, the Bilbao Museum, and Reina Sofia Museum.
Also known for her writing, Lacy edited Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art and is author of Leaving Art: Writings on Performance, Politics, and Publics, 1974–2007. She is currently working on What Kind of City, a book with Alistair Hudson. She is a professor at the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California and a resident artist at 18th Street Arts Center.