A lecture? A performance? An idiosyncratic conjoining of both? Visual artist Suzanne Bocanegra uses theater to interrogate the history and practice of the visual arts. Part performance, part memoir, and part gleefully rambling cultural essay, her “Artist Performance Lectures” are intensely personal, exhaustively researched, and kaleidoscopically wide-ranging. With the assistance of a series of mirthful “guests,” she explains the hows and whys of being an artist, while offering elucidating meditations on art-making, history, popular culture and our shifting ideals of human beauty.
Honor, starring Lili Taylor and directed by Geoff Sobelle, is based on a 16th-century tapestry at the Metropolitan Museum of Art titled “Honor,” which depicts 69 historical and allegorical figures who offer personal stories as moral lessons in honor and in dishonor. Bocanegra’s very close reading of the tapestry leads her to weave together such diverse topics as Carole King’s Tapestry album, tableau vivant, the founding of the Girl Scouts of America, Anni Albers, the Monkees, and the history of theater.
Previous performances have been commissioned and/or presented by the Museum of Modern Art, The Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance at the Ace Theater, the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Hammer Museum, and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, among others. Bocanegra’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston) and the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), among others. https://suzannebocanegra.com