Co-Founders
SUZANNE LACY
Suzanne Lacy is a performance artist whose prolific career includes performances, video and photographic installation, critical writing and public practices in communities. She is best known as one of the Los Angeles performance artists who became active in the Seventies and shaped and emergent art of social engagement. Her work ranges from intimate, graphic body explorations to large-scale public performances involving literally hundreds of performers and thousands of audience members. Lacy was founding chair of the MFA in Public Practice at the Otis College of Art and Design. She holds a Doctor of Philosophy from Gray's School of Art at Robert Gordon University in Scotland. She currently teaches at the University of Southern California Roski School of Art and Design and is a fellow in residence at 18th Street Arts Center.
LESLIE LABOWITZ
Labowitz received her MFA from Otis Art Institute and moved to Germany in 1972 as a Fulbright scholar where she worked with Joseph Beuys and began performing in public space on women’s issues. In 1977 she returned to the US and began her collaboration with Suzanne Lacy in Three Weeks In May. Her work has been exhibited internationally and featured in many books and publications. In 1980, she began a 35 year durational performance called SPROUTIME, dedicated to her mother, a Holocaust survivor. SPROUTIME started as a performance and urban farm in Venice, Ca growing organic sprouts and greens that became the material for installations and performances. These works were contextually multi-layered and addressed her own healing from her work on violence against women and her own family dynamics as a child of a holocaust survivor with the politics of war, food and economics. SPROUTIME grew into a large business distributing organic foods throughout the US and employing over 60 people. Labowitz served on the Board of the SoCal Farmers Market Association and the Board of 18th Street Arts Center and maintains her studio there.
