Of the People, by the People . . .

Whatever else “Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s ‘Dinner Party’ in Feminist Art History” is--including an occasion for assessing feminism’s legacy and reuniting Chicago’s collaborators--the exhibition at the UCLA/Hammer Museum is also an opportunity to catch up with feminist artists who emerged in the socially conscious 1970s but faded from view in the profligate 1980s.

Among the most intriguing of these “long-lost” figures is Suzanne Lacy, who is represented in the show by photographs of “In Mourning and in Rage,” a 1977 performance about rape she did in Los Angeles with Leslie Laborwitz. At the time, Lacy--who had earned a degree in psychology at Cal State Fresno and studied at CalArts with Chicago and conceptualist Allan Kaprow--was a prominent L.A. activist who successfully placed her work in a public forum.

What happened to her? Well, she didn’t drop out; she moved to the Bay Area about a decade ago and continued working. As dean of fine arts at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, she contends with administrative duties and teaches courses in performance and community-related art, but she hasn’t vanished into academia. Among recent items on her resume is an ambitious public performance honoring women in Chicago. She is also editor of “Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art,” a book of essays by various authors that evolved from a CCAC program, “City Sites: Artists and Urban Strategies.”

But at the moment, Lacy’s heart, soul and prodigious energy are rooted in Oakland and her art is in the service of teenagers. “No Blood/No Foul,” her latest effort, scheduled for last Wednesday night, was billed as a basketball game performance with kids and cops. Staged for an audience interested in solving problems between Oakland’s youth and police, the public event initiated the city of Oakland’s proposed youth policy, to be presented at a City Council meeting June 18.

The performance was conceived as “a basketball game with a difference,” Lacy said during a recent trip to Los Angeles. A real game, at City Center’s Club One in downtown Oakland, was accompanied by a special soundtrack, murals by graffiti artists and video interviews of the players. Referees changed each quarter, with players themselves calling fouls during the third quarter and the audience voting on the referees’ calls during the fourth quarter. At the end of the game, the audience was invited to listen to the players talk about real-life relationships between youth and officers.

“The performances in Oakland are very exciting to me,” Lacy said, referring both to “No Blood/No Foul” and a 1994 work, “The Roof Is on Fire,” in which the public eavesdropped on issue-oriented conversations among 220 youths seated in cars on a rooftop parking lot. Attracting an audience of 1,000, the piece got lots of local television coverage and was preserved in a one-hour documentary.

“I’ve worked for over 20 years in this field, but I only involve the media in projects dealing with topics that seem as if they ought to be brought before a mass audience,” she said. “Working with teenagers has been a real focus for me since 1992, when I started wondering about the mostly African American young people who walked by the California College of Arts and Crafts on their way to high school. I realized that I knew very little about them except through the media, so I volunteered with my colleague, Chris Johnson--a photographer who teaches at CCAC and has a strong history of activism--to teach a class with high school teachers using media as a way to involve students in a discussion of their own value system.

“We did that because we knew that media was a very influential part of their lives, almost like an absentee parent. They have a very ambiguous relationship to media because their culture is co-opted for commercial purposes, to sell products, which brings them into the mainstream culture, but media also projects an image of teenagers as gangsters,” she said.

“It becomes very complicated, so we thought we would give them some tools to think about media and how it affects who they are. At the end, we did a performance, which was very successful. The next year, 15 teachers from public high schools came to a series of seminars that Chris and I put together with another colleague, Annice Jacoby,” Lacy said. That program led to “The Roof Is on Fire,” which raised the issue of conflict with the police, the subject of “No Blood/No Foul.”

In the process of organizing their latest performance, Lacy and her partners have worked with police to develop sensitivity training programs pertaining to youth. One result is “Cops, Teens and Videotape,” a videotape used for officers’ training in “youth-focused community policing,” said Capt. Sharon Jones of the Oakland Police Department.

It may appear that Lacy has forged a peculiar alliance, but Jones disputes that. “We all have to be so creative in our approach to problems, there’s a natural marriage between artists and cops,” she said. “No single solution applies to every situation. We constantly have to look at things from a new perspective. We have a lot in common with artists.”

For Lacy, this is only the beginning of her work with teens and police. “This year and the next two years are very important in the whole history of my work,” she said. “I received a major grant from the Surdna Foundation to work in the Oakland community on youth issues to see if I can describe one or more models for how artists can actually work with and affect public policy. The foundation just launched an arts program that was open by invitation only, using three years of model projects to see where they want to go. . . . Oakland is the perfect place for this work. With its history of the Black Panthers, it’s got a strong multiracial community, an empowered group of people of different ethnicities.”

If her current work seems to have pulled Lacy away from feminism and even farther from her studio, that’s a misperception, she said. “I’m not different than I’ve ever been. I’m following the same kind of thought process and theoretical development. I think what’s happened--and it’s one of my frustrations with current feminist art and feminism in general--is that in disconnecting itself from its activist base, feminism has lost track of the fact that many of us were deeply concerned with racial politics and socially active politics in the ‘70s.”

Another problem with feminism is “the theoretical divide,” she said. “I absolutely disagree that there is theory and there is action. There was as much theory in the ‘70s as there was action in the ‘80s. The theory was simply of a different nature.”

Lacy also has an answer for people who ask why her work is art. “From the Futurists and the Russian Constructivists on, there have always been forms of theater that have come directly out of painting--forms of visually based, theatrical expression like happenings and Dada and Surrealism. All of those had political overtones. There’s no problem in my mind justifying it. I think the problem today is how to decide whether it’s good or bad,” she said.

Furthermore, it’s the art part that keeps her going, she said. “I’m just passionately in love with my work. I love to make art or write or do almost anything that’s about invention and creation. That’s really it. There’s something about art that’s self-making and reflective. You reflect an internal shape of your own personality or persona. I think Kaprow said, ‘Art is a meaning-making activity.’ That’s what it’s about.”