Suzanne Lacy | Between the Door and the Street

Cooper Gallery is proud to present Between the Door and the Street the first solo exhibition in Scotland by the highly esteemed American artist Suzanne Lacy.

Celebrated internationally since the 1970s as a pioneer in socially engaged and public performance art, Lacy’s wide-ranging practice instigates discussions on and brings attention to urgent social concerns including aging, gender equity, immigration, labour rights, poverty, racism, and violence against women. Whilst being steeped in ground-up practices of community organising and political activism, Lacy’s works are also utterly enthused with the poetic sensibility of the avant-garde.

Encompassing Lacy’s critical politics and the formal hybridity characteristic of her projects, Cooper Gallery hosts a unique exhibition of material drawn from her highly lauded 2013 project for Creative Time and the Brooklyn Museum in New York City; Between the Door and the Street. Featuring a selection of texts, archival material and a three-channel video installation, Cooper Gallery captures Lacy’s and those she worked with, absolute sense of urgency to tackle how the politics of women’s bodies enter into the realms of public discourse and governmental policy.

Developing out of six months of conversations between Lacy, 400 women and a few men from activist groups in New York City, Between the Door and the Street culminated in a one-day performative public action that took place on 64 stoops in a Brooklyn neighbourhood. Witnessed by over 2500 people who entered the closed-off street, the performance audience became a ‘listening voyeur’ to unscripted conversations among groups of women, identified by yellow pashmina scarves, seated on the steps and porches of individual homes. Choreographed by activist inspired and group generated questions on gender, race, ethnicity and class, the conversations weaved together multiple intergenerational narratives that grappled with the politics of immigration, labour, poverty, all of which have significant impacts on women’s lives.

In 2025, twelve years since Between the Door and the Street happened one Saturday on a street in Brooklyn so much has and hasn’t changed for women around the world. Faced with growing authoritarianism and a profoundly illiberal backlash to decades of progressive change, Lacy’s life-long commitment to the critical issues confronting women today provides a vital clarion call to the necessity of continued community organizing and political activism.

But Between the Door and the Street isn’t simply ‘politics’; for Cooper Gallery Lacy’s work illuminates the subtle conversational poetics that is intimately present in the struggle for women’s freedom from oppression and violence.