Alterations 1994 & 2019
Performance/Installation
Suzanne Lacy, Susanne Cockrell, Britta Kathmeyer
Alterations was featured in the gallery during WE ARE HERE, Suzanne Lacy's 2019 Retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, curated by Rudolf Frieling, Lucia Sanramon, and Dominic Willsdon. The exhibition and installation traveled to Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo in Sevilla, Spain in 2020-21.This performance installation was originally staged in 1994 for the group exhibition Old Glory, New Story: Flagging the 21st Century at Capp Street Projects in San Francisco. Artists were asked to reimagine the American Flag. We collected hundreds of pounds of red, white, and blue used clothing and constructed three mounds in the gallery. We invited older women to hand-stitch the garments together into endless anthropomorphic stripes in the gallery throughout the exhibition. The women worked quietly, almost hidden, laboring over a task that would never be complete. A sewing machine chugged along remotely amongst the piles. We wanted to address the invisible labor of migrant women in the garment industry in the surrounding neighborhood of Capp Street, close to where SF MOMA is located today. The installation generated community conversations, including one high school group that came in to discuss patriotism, race, gender, and disenfranchisement. Below you see a combination of images from both exhibitions. During the exhibition at SF MOMA, one could sign up to stitch on specific days and times each week.
