Between the Door and the Street

A Performance Initiated by Suzanne Lacy

This fall, Creative Time and the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum will present Between the Door and the Street, a major work by the internationally celebrated artist Suzanne Lacy. On October 19 at dusk, some 300 women and a few men–all selected to represent a cross-section of ages, backgrounds, and perspectives–will gather on the stoops along a residential street (Park Place between Underhill and Vanderbilt Avenues) in Brooklyn, where they will engage in unscripted conversations about a variety of issues related to gender politics today. Wander among the groups, listen to what they are saying, and form your own opinions!

The Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU is thrilled to be participating in the project with a stoop conversation about gender, race, fashion, and public space featuring Minh-Ha T. Pham (Threadbared; Of Another Fashion; Cornell University), Sharon Heijin Lee (New York University), Christina Moon (Parsons, The New School for Design), Shauna Sweeney (New York University), and Eva Hageman (New York University).

About the participants

Eva Hageman is a PhD student in American Studies at NYU and a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow. Her research examines the political and visual economy of race in popular culture, in particular reality television. Eva has produced/directed two short documentaries that focus on race in popular culture: Legendary and You, As Seen On TV.

Sharon Heijin Lee is an Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Lee is currently working on a manuscript that maps the discursive formation of plastic surgery in South Korea, Asia, and Asian America by asking how it has become economically necessary and a viable form of self-management. Lee’s research agenda seeks to theorize the concealed relations between seemingly unrelated and often uninterrogated spheres—popular and consumer culture, medicine, tourism, the military, and other governmental institutions—and her work has been published in Women and Performance: Journal of Feminist Theory.

Christina H. Moon is an Assistant Professor in the School of Art and Design History and Theory and Director of the MA Fashion Studies at Parsons The New School for Design. She received her doctoral degree from Yale University in the department of Anthropology. Her research looks at the social ties and cultural encounters between fashion design worlds and manufacturing landscapes in Asia and the Americas, specifically exploring the memory, migration, and labor of its cultural workers. Her most recent project is on the fast-fashion industry within the US. Moon writes on material culture, social memory, the ephemeral and everyday, and ways of knowing and representing in ethnographic practice. She is the recipient of research grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Kauffman Foundation, Fulbright Program, and Korea Foundation.

Minh-Ha T. Pham is an Assistant Professor of Visual Studies and Asian American Studies at Cornell University. An interdisciplinary scholar, she writes about the intersections of race, gender, fashion, technology, and consumerism. Her current research focuses on the digital cultures, economies, social relations, and practices that structure leading Asian personal style blogs. She has published in a wide array of forums from academic journals to popular and political magazines. In addition, her research has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Nation, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Chronicle of Higher Education, among other media sites. She is also co-author of a research blog on the politics of fashion called Threadbared and the founder of a digital archive of the fashion histories of US women of color called Of Another Fashion.

Shauna Sweeney is a PhD Candidate in the History Department at NYU. Her interests include gender and slavery, Caribbean slavery and economy, and social histories of emancipation. Her dissertation, “Provisioning Freedom: Gender, Slave Emancipation and Political Economy in Jamaica, 1800-1888” examines the role of Jamaica’s female-centered internal marketing system in articulating the liberatory political visions and geographies of formerly enslaved Afro-Jamaicans. The project focuses on the culture of freedom that grew up through the practice of subsistence farming and marketing. She is also interested in the history of fashion in the African diaspora and the legal and illegal trades in clothing and fabric during slavery.

About the project
Between the Door and the Street grew out of a series of deep and wide-ranging conversations between Lacy and a group of activist women, held over the course of five months. Lacy considers this preparatory work to be a key part of the project as a whole, and their ideas, expertise, and principles have informed the project.

This project builds on Lacy’s rich body of work devoted to issues of feminism, including Silver Action, presented at Tate Modern, London, earlier this year; The Tattooed Skeleton, at the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, in 2010; and Cleaning Conditions, part of the Do It exhibition at the Manchester Art Gallery, in summer 2013. This is her first public project in New York City.

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