The Los Angeles-based artist Suzanne Lacy has operated largely outside the confines of the art world and within the public sphere for most of her five-decade career. From the 1970s onward, as an exponent of the feminist consciousness-raising circles of Judy Chicago and the Happenings of Alan Kaprow, she developed a social practice that reconfigured the parameters of performance art, centering her work on large-scale, long-term community projects focused on themes of violence against women, poverty, racism and more.
