!Women Art Revolution: Interview with Suzanne Lacy Interviewed by Lynn Hershman Date unknown Location unknown Suzanne Lacy: So, history. I got involved with feminism first in the late 60s I went to Washington and ran into some women from the Women’s Psychological . .American Psychological Association and. .you don’t want this detailed. Lynn Hershman: Talk about Fresno and how you got into the program. SL: I was a psychology grad student and I met Faith Wilding at Fresno State and feminism was just starting to happen. I Brought Back my version of it from the east coast and Faith and I decided to organize the Fresno State campus, so we called a meeting one night, not knowing who would come, just put up signs all over campus and 50 women showed up, looking at us quite expectantly. LH: What did the sign say? SL: Signs just said something about—Women, come. .you know. .explore your rights. Something like that. Women Unite sort of poster, and we sort of looked at each other. We didn’t know what to do, and we kind of whispered and decided to talk aBout sex, Because that’s what women always talked aBout. And it was a galvanizing meeting. Women loved it, and they spent 2-3 hours talking about it. And that’s basically how the feminist movement at Fresno State got started. LH: Was that after Judy Chicago was there or Before? SL: Before. About the same time Judy was organizing. .can I look at Lynn? !Women Art Revolution is a digital collection presented by Stanford University Libraries http://lib.stanford.edu/women-art-revolution Page 1 About the time Faith and I were doing that. [interruption] Faith Wilding and I met at Fresno State when I was in graduate school, and we decided that we were going to sort of launch the feminist movement at Fresno State, so we put up signs all over campus and invited women to come and meet with us . .suBject unknown. And we were incredibly shocked. Fifty women showed up, and there they sat looking at us expectantly and we had really not prepared for this at all. So, we quickly strategized and came up with the topic of sex, and we figured that that would interest the women, and indeed it did, and so the feminist movement at Fresno State was launched. We began organizing and holding meetings. About this same time, Judy Chicago had come from Los Angeles and was negotiating with the art department who wanted her to teach. And she said she would as long as they would do a feminist art program. And she in mind an experimental program with women to train them to be conscious, politicized, women artists. And I’m not sure she knew what all that meant yet. She was still reading furiously. And you rememBer, this was the end of the 60s. So, the movement was still very new. There were, I rememBer, at that time two Books—Born Female and Feminine Mystique, and de Beauvoir’s book. Those were the only Books available anyplace. So, it was a very early time. So, Judy set up interviews and was interviewing women to let them into the program and Faith said, You like to draw even though you’re a grad student in psychology, you’re interested in art, why don’t you come do this? And I said, Great. And, so I interviewed and at the end of the interview Judy said, Well, you know, it seems to me like you’re on a professional track to psychology. And I said, Well, yeah, but I just wrote a 30-page paper on creativity and I’m interested in it and she said, Well, I don’t want you in the program Because you’re not going to Be a professional artist. Which is really the joke that Judy and I continue to share aBout her particular judgment aBout character, because of all the people that she worked with, Faith and I are probably the ones that have stayed most visiBle as artists over the years, and as feminist artists. She finally relented after Faith worked on her for three or four months, and that Fall let me into the program. And I Basically aBandoned my graduate studies in psychology and threw myself into this program, still working on my degree in psychology and sociology, But Basically worked Judy, Faith and a group of fifteen other women. And we started the first feminist art program. I don’t know if you want me to go into that. LH: MayBe you could talk aBout what the philosophy was. !Women Art Revolution is a digital collection presented by Stanford University Libraries http://lib.stanford.edu/women-art-revolution Page 2 SL: I think Judy proBaBly articulates this better than I do, but I think what she had in mind, and what evolved what to Be the guiding philosophy of the feminist art program was to create a space apart, where women uncover their . the realities of their experience and kind of put their experience into synch with their awareness of who they were, Because the idea was that women’s identity was pretty much given culturally, and that identity could Be shaped. .the true authentic identity could be shaped by pulling out experience, essentially. So, in that sense it really set the tone for the kind of deconstructionist feminist theories that came later. We said that Basically a female identity is a created identity, it’s a manufactured identity. But, we believed that, but we also believed that there was a true identity and that that was to be found in experience. So, the dilemma was, How do you dig up the experience? And in sharing it and in consciousness raising groups does that reflect and mirror that experience back in the way that you begin to see who you are? And of course the project was always intensely political Because, rememBer the personal is political. What that meant was that my experience as a woman, if I was raped, if I sat in a group and found that five others out of ten had Been, there was a political implication to my private experience. So, that’s Basically, I think there were other tenants that all related to that, having to do with. Having to do with reinvestigating or re-exploring women’s history. I rememBer the . Nancy Yodelman came dashing into one of our round taBle discussions one day, with this Book. It was this old Book from the 1890s and she said, Look at this, there was a woman’s Building in Chicago in 1893 at the worlds fair and we all just fell upon the Book and devoured it. And we were really, we had. one portion of the program was art making and one portion was consciousness raising and one portion was educating ourselves on feminist art history. And reading aBout all the painters of the past and so on with kind of a renewed vision. So it was it a revisionist, sort of where the notion of revisionist history from a feminist perspective also began. Not necessarily in Chicago, But within that whole. .not necessarily in the feminist art program in Fresno, But at that point in time across the country there were some few experiments of this nature going on. I think there was one or two in New York, of different natures, But they seemed. .the experimenting seemed to Be strongest in an educational institution. SuBsequent to that, in Los Angeles there was a protest of the Art and Technology show that Maurice Tuckman put on By women who said, of seventy five artists, one is a woman? There’s a proBlem here. So women protested. Linda Nochlin’s exhiBition came out of that, as a raft of organizing in Los Angeles about that time. That was while we were in Fresno. All of this was sort of happening simultaneously or when we first came to CalArts. Judy’s program in Fresno transferred to CalArts the second year, and then Miriam Schapiro got involved with it. In Los Angeles there was a protest, there . Woman’s Space gallery was opened in downtown LA and Judy was involved in that and . Sheila came to Fresno, visited us there and was interested in starting a design program at CalArts, and she asked me to Be her teaching assistant. That’s how Sheila got involved with the whole thing. !Women Art Revolution is a digital collection presented by Stanford University Libraries http://lib.stanford.edu/women-art-revolution Page 3 Anyway, a lot of organizing happening in the city of Los Angeles with women. It was a very powerful moment in time. Faith Wilding’s Book By Her Own Hands really details this whole history, and then Judy’s program, which came from Fresno to CalArts the next year. .how much detail about CalArts? LH: What happened after. .just the major points? SL: So, we went to CalArts and I was with Sheila in the design program, and I was sort of supposed to lead the feminist theory and the consciousness raising, and Sheila led the design and we were sort of co- teaching. And then there was the art program and Judy was off with Mimi doing Womanhouse. The design program was quite interesting because this took these ideas that were percolating all through CalArts and began to put them into informational context Because in graphic design you’re interested in communication, so we used video, we used Broadsheets, we used Books, printing, and every one of our projects were focused on taking private and making public.