Suzanne Lacy | Rape Is

Suzanne Lacy

Rape Is

Los Angeles, USA: Self-published, 1972

[unpaginated], 14.4 x 15.2 x .6 cm., softcover

Edition of 1300

A harrowing book about sexual assault that is sadly no less relevant almost fifty years after its initial publication. Originally published in an edition of 300 in 1972, the title was reprinted four years later in an edition of 1000 copies. 

"Lacy tackled the subject of rape and the cultural attitudes that promote it in her first artist’s book, produced in the Women’s Design Program at California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. The title riffs on the Happiness Is book genre. Her mentor Sheila Levrant de Bretteville suggested that it open down the middle, the flaps joined with a sticker seal, to make the reader consciously aware of invading a private experience. Another of her teachers, the writer Deena Metzger, supported the development of the text. "

- excerpt from Suzanne Lacy: We Are Here

"[Art undertaken as activism against sexual assault] can be said to have begun quietly, with the creation of an inexpensive little book by Suzanne Lacy called Rape Is. First published in 1972, it marked a leap outward from individual accounts of personal experience toward a far broader definition of rape and a much wider audience. By early 1977, Lacy and several other artists had organized Three Weeks in May, a program of events that produced national headlines. It proved a turning point in Lacy’s career and, although this has not been sufficiently acknowledged, it heralded—perhaps it invented—a new genre of art. The development of “relational aesthetics” and “social practice” art over the past decade and more is significantly indebted to Lacy and her collaborators. Other artists, mainly women, were beginning to engage in similar efforts. But Lacy, drawing on work with Judy Chicago, and also with a wide range of collaborators including, especially, Leslie Labowitz, was singularly influential in forging a union between artists, civic leaders, community organizers, and the mainstream news and entertainment media.

- Nancy Princenthal, Art News, 2019