Suzanne Lacy and Andrea Bowers

This Earth, 2020

Single channel video, 3:34 min.

This collaboration by Andrea Bowers and Suzanne Lacy was created under the confines of the early COVID pandemic as a project bringing together a group of artists to celebrate and honor the work of eco-feminist poet Susan Griffin in a collective reading from the 1978 book, Woman and Nature, The Roaring Inside Her. It was made for Create Art for Earth, a partnership between Judy Chicago, Jane Fonda, Hans Ulrich Obrist and the Serpentine Galleries, Swoon, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Fire Drill Fridays, and Greenpeace.

Performers in order of appearance: Andrea Bowers, Catherine Opie, Kristina Wong, Chelo and Luna Montoya, Mónica Mayer, Hyun Kyung Chung, Susan Griffin, Leslie Labowitz Starus, Juno Stilley and Jess Gooding, Lucía Sanromán, Kelly Curry, Patty Chang, Asia Gonzalez, Barbara T. Smith, Cauleen Smith, Laverne Woods Dunn, Zut Lorz, Lauren Bon, Simone Forti, Ellen Sebastian Chang, Donna Deitch and Terry Jentz, Judy Baca, Mary Weatherford, Beatriz Cortez, Jodie Evans, Ingrid von Sydow, Lauren Halsey, Suzanne Lacy, and Nao Bustamante.

Suzanne Lacy is a pioneer in socially engaged and public performance art. Her large-scale projects span the globe and her writing includes Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art and Leaving Art: Writings on Performance, Politics, and Publics. She is a professor at Roski School of Art and Design, University of Southern California and a resident artist at 18th Street Arts Center.

Andrea Bowers merges art and social activism to focus on feminist, labor, political, and environmental issues. Grounded in the legacy of feminist art, Bowers’ conceptual and socially engaged work comprises collaborative projects, drawing, installation, and video. The drawings, which include meticulously detailed pencil drawings and large-scale cardboard images sourced from political graphics, serve as empathetic tools. The installations, photographs, and videos reflect the artist’s direct political stance in conversation with current issues and art historical movements, while her participatory projects use activist strategies to reach multiple constituencies and to reconsider the historical record.