Photo: Víctor Lerma

In 1979, while studying at the Feminist Studio Workshop in the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles, Ca., I participated in Suzanne Lacy's Making it Safe project. Since my arrival a year earlier at this mythical feminist art school, I had sought to work closely with Lacy and Leslie Labowitz and their group Ariadne: A Social Art Network, because they presented art as a form of protest and their work inhabited museums, the street and mass media. For that reason, I asked Lacy to be the advisor for my master's thesis at Goddard College and got involved in the projects she was working on at that time, such as the Take Back the Night https://www.suzannelacy.com/take-back-the-night-1978 performance and Making it Safe. https://www.suzannelacy.com/making-it-safe-1979

Commissioned by Communitas, a local social organization, Making it Safe aimed to use art to reduce the levels of violence against women in the Ocean Park community. Lacy gathered a group to work on the project, and I immediately signed up.

How could art be used to decrease violence? What artistic and political tools could we use? Who would participate in the event and how? How could we address the personal and the political? When the goal of an artistic work is political, where does the aesthetic fit in? What is art? What are politics? I'm not sure if we openly addressed all of these questions, but looking back, it is clear that we were grappling with them.

In those days, Making it Safe was what Lacy defined as a "non-audience-oriented performance." Today, it would clearly be considered as social practice, but the term didn’t exist back then. As I understood it, these art projects consisted on using art to change the social fabric and this might include different actions over an extended period of time.

After analyzing what was happening in the community, getting acquainted with its members and resources, we came up with a project. At the time it seemed very strange to me. I didn’t really understand how this was art. However, I embraced it eagerly because I had already realized that we needed to expand and reshape the definition of art in order to propose the type of feminist art we were working towards.

The project had many elements aimed at different sectors of the community. We organized lectures, poetry readings, public sessions to denounce incest, a large exhibition throughout the local shops on the main street, the distribution of leaflets, media interventions, self-defense classes at the nursing home and intimate dialogues. Lacy’s project ended with a large demonstration/performance/candlelit dinner at the local park, with the participation of more than 250 women who had been involved in the project in one way or another.

While Making it Safe was Lacy's piece in which others collaborated, there were also spaces for us to present our own works.

El Tendedero in Mexico City in 1978 had been so meaningful for me, that I decided to create a new version for Making it Safe, even though in those days repeating a performance was frowned upon.

Photo: Víctor Lerma

The questions in the El Tendedero de L.A. / The L.A. Clothesline dealt with the resident’s perception of safety and insecurity and their suggestions on how to improve this situation. This new Tendedero was simpler than the one at the Museum of Modern Art because I set it up at various points on the street as a performance, so it only required a cord, paper, pens and clothespins. In the end, I presented all the answers at the local library. The piece worked very well: it was clear that this traditionally feminine form was a powerful and practical tool to communicate with other women and to address the violence that many of us experienced.

Photo: Víctor Lerma