In the 1970s, artist Suzanne Lacy began fusing the abstract, cerebral nature of conceptual art with the socially conscious aims of feminist art, creating large-scale public works intended to revitalize the theater of public life. She once staged a massive basketball game between the youth of Oakland and the Oakland police department, with the first half played according to NBA regulations and the second half played according to street rules: no blood? No foul. For the halftime show, the teens took questions from the media about their opinions on the police. In the late ’80s, Lacy spent three years creating a living tableau encompassing 430 elderly women sitting around tables and chatting about what it feels like to be a woman aging—and becoming increasingly invisible. When viewed from above, the tables formed an elaborate pattern of colorful geometric shapes, which shifted into a new pattern whenever the women shifted positions. In our interview, I asked her about her 2012 piece Three Weeks in January, which, like the rest of her work over the past forty years, bridges the gap between architecture and psychology, the built environment and imaginative space.

—Amy Klein

Three Weeks in Januray

THE BELIEVER: Let’s talk about Three Weeks in January. Can you tell me why you decided to ask youth to mark police reports of rape on a map of Los Angeles every day?

SUZANNE LACY: The project was part of Pacific Standard Time, a yearlong series of exhibitions at over fifty institutions looking at artworks from the ’40s through the ’80s that were performative and transient in nature. I was invited to re-create my 1977 project Three Weeks in May, which was similar to this project. One of the issues in thinking about contemporary redos is: how do you do it given that the social context has changed so dramatically? It has changed in terms of how people look at art. And in my case, it has also changed in terms of the way rape is seen in society.

BLVR: So how did you update the work to take into consideration the changes in feminism, the mass media, and the art world since the ’70s?

SL: Part of the idea with the original project was to position the artist as a revealer of hidden information, which I think is not really viable in the current context, with the internet. I don’t think that’s the privileged role of the artist at this point, but in 1977 it was a very significant role—to use art as a power for revealing hidden experience, and for urging collaboration and interdisciplinary engagement in social change.

This time we started by talking to a lot of the organizations that were founded around...