Alterations 2019
Suzanne Lacy, Susanne Cockrell, Britta Kathmeyer

 

Performance/installation for WE ARE HERE, Suzanne Lacy's 2019 Retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2019, 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.

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​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 piles of used red, white and blue clothing and built three mounds in the gallery. We invited women to come and hand-stitch the garments together in the gallery in endless anthropomorphic stripes. The women worked quietly, almost hidden, laboring over a task that will never be complete. A sewing machine chugged along automatically in the middle of the piles. We wanted to address the invisible labor of migrant women in the garment industry in the Capp Street’s surrounding neighborhood, close to where SF MOMA is located today. The installation generated community conversations including one high school group who came in to discuss patriotism, race and gender, and disenfranchisement. Below you see a combination of images from both exhibitions. At SF MOMA one could sign up to stitch on specific days and times each week.

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This installation/performance was