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Public Lecture

Beautiful Trouble: A Conversation on Activism, Art and Buddhism with Suzanne Lacy and Jodie Evans

University of Victoria, Hickman Building, 105 Lecture Theatre

In her various roles as a producer and global activist, Jodie Evans, author, activist and co-director of CODEPINK (Los Angeles), has had the opportunity to work with His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, and the Zen master, Thich Naht Hahn, who advocated for a notion of engaged Buddhism during the Vietnam War. As Evans states, “Can you be a Buddhist and not be an activist? Art is activism in the same way…[it] invites us see differently which breaks us out of the shackles of the status quo, isn’t that activism?”

Suzanne Lacy, a pioneering artist in social art practice (Los Angeles) was introduced to Buddhism in the mid-1980s, when the artist, Allan Kaprow, introduced her to his teacher, Joko Beck. She writes, “Perhaps we are just beginning to understand the difficulty of analyzing engaged art with conventional critical strategies. Just as artists in the 1970s asked, ‘Who is the artist?’ so today we might ask, ‘How does a work of art serve?”

Join us in a conversation between two longtime friends with shared values, exploring the relationship between art and activism, and buddhism, and the spaces in between.

Jodie Evans is a co-founder of CODEPINK, a worldwide network committed to working for peace and social justice that began in 2002 as a grassroots effort to prevent the US war on Iraq.

Suzanne Lacy, feminist artist and the subject of a recent major retrospective, We Are Here (2019) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA), teaches at the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California.

Presented in partnership with the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and the University of Victoria, Faculty of Fine Arts, Orion Series Fine Arts.
Open to the public.

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