Suzanne Lacy + Final Projects

We are running out of time, folks, but I want you to finish reading Irish's book on Suzanne Lacy. There are only 50 pages left to go, which cover Lacy's work on teen violence in her home area of Oakland, CA. This body of work shows a mature artist who has learned from her mistakes and found a way of doing effective, sustainable community-based collaborative performance art. Some hallmarks of her '90s work are: longterm (2+ yrs) research and community organizing efforts prior to presenting any kind of public event; personal investment and permanent residency in the neighborhoods most effected by the artwork; dispersed leadership; and sustained focus on one issue over a period of more than a decade.

The trajectory of her art from the early '70s - present reflects and embodies key developments in public art and U.S.-based feminism in the latter half of the 20th century. For example, in feminism the shift from Second to Third-Wave feminism was basically a philosophical shift in refocus from commonalities between women (the "we are the world" syndrome) to prioritizing difference (race, class, genders, national origin, religion, age, ability, etc.). This is one of the things that makes Lacy's work important. If you have any doubt about this, just look through the back issues of the leading public and performance art journals of the last 3 decades, Public Art Review and High Performance.

And so, even though we're moving into the period when you need to start thinking of your final project for this class, I want you to keep reading and incorporate your knowledge of chapters 6 - the conclusion into your final paper/project/response. There won't be any discussion topics or questions for the last chapters. It's entirely up to you to determine what matters and what doesn't matter to your own research objectives.

As you know, one of the main objectives of this class was to facilitate your own research process. Throughout the semester, I have asked you to relate the different readings to your own interests and objectives as a grad student. If you came into the class not sure of your research agenda, hopefully by now you have formulated an idea. If you came into the class with a research idea but no clear plan of action of how to implement it, by now you should have a clearer sense of direction. In the final project, I will again ask you to apply the readings to your research as it has evolved over the semester.


It is important that you understand - as I think all of you do - that your research project for this class should not be different from your MAE thesis idea or PhD dissertation idea. For this reason, the pages you write for your final project may include sections of papers you are writing or have written for other classes. Obviously, I don't want you to plagiarize yourself. I do want to underscore the importance of developing a consistent idea that pulls in material from all aspect of yur graduate program, because this is how you will put thesis or dissertation together.

I expect your final paper to contain ideas and writings from the blogs. You may quote another member of the class, as long as you cite them appropriately. Make sure to cite all of your sources according to APA style, as outlined in the very helpful APA sites listed in the right column of the blog (I use these sites when I'm feeling too lazy to open my paper APA manual - which is to say most of the time!). Your final paper should be exploratory: a work in progress. I don't expect you to wrap up your ideas in a nice neat conclusion, as might be expected in other classes. The whole point of this class was to get you thinking about what you could do in your graduate program and how you could go about making it happen.

It shouldn't be hard for you to come up with 10 pages of writing on your chosen research topic. Remember - I expect to have read some of it before. What's important to me is how you reassemble your thoughts in the format of a paper, and how you make connections to other ideas you thought of on your own or in the context of other classes. It may sound like I'm asking you to rehash old ideas, but I think you will discover many new things in the process of piecing-together. A quilt, as you know, is more than a bunch of squares sewn together in a certain pattern. Putting the pieces together to form a whole always takes more time than one could ever imagine. Well, the same goes for writing a thesis paper or dissertation.

You will have the last 2 weeks of the semester to work on this project. Please feel free to ask questions of others via the blog or to email me with questions. You can send me an early draft if you're feeling unsure, and I'll give you feedback. Please send me the "final final" in a Word document to my email address: c.erler@ttu.edu   Everything is due on May 13th. Please let me know in advance if you foresee a problem getting it finished by then. Some of you, I know, will be taking your Departmental Qualifying Exam at exactly the same time.

Good luck, everyone!!!