Each women’s group is represented through a handmade pillow knitted outside the glass doors by a knitter that witnessed their conversation visually, but not verbally.

For the opening reception on Saturday, May 5, participants from the women’s groups as well as visitors to MOCA were able to step inside the Geffen’s reading room to listen to the intimate conversations via iPod headsets. The discussions are anywhere from 45-90 minutes long and address issues the groups face regularly such as working as women in their profession, balancing family and work needs, advocating for fair wages and benefits, responding to harassment and other poignant moments of working to survive. The audio recordings were edited only slightly from the original conversations and capture the sentiments, pleas and interests as the women process together. A period of warming up was necessary within each group, but as one woman tells her story, the others were often easily instigated to respond and append. Allowed a behind the scenes position through listening to the recording, visitors intake as much of the conversation as they desire and can navigate multiple conversations through one iPod to choose the one they find most compelling.

A participant from the homecare workers group and her daughter listen to her group’s conversation.

While the audio transports the listeners inside the conversation, they sit on the same couches where the conversations took place, surrounded by handmade pillows. A pillow was knit for each woman’s group in the group’s chosen color. The pillows, as well as a photo album containing post-conversation portraits of each group, are there to complement the audio in representing the groups in their absence. The knitter of each pillow sat outside the room, unable to hear the conversations, but carefully watching the women’s reactions as her hands knit the pillow. With the current surge in popular interest for knitting, the placement of a knitter outside the Reading Room brings awareness of the craft’s role as a device for bringing women together for dialogue, as is often the case with knitting circles that occur throughout Los Angeles on a cyclical basis. As well, a reference to Madame Defarge, who in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities used the craft of knitting as a device to spread insurgent information in the French Revolution, is intriguing in relationship to the artist Suzanne Lacy’s agenda in bringing the contemporary female voices into the museum space. What is the new revolution that might be at hand as visitors are given access to these frequently invisible women? When the hands are occupied is the mind free to express itself from a deeper place?

At the least, Lacy’s sound installation demonstrates that when a group of women bound by a common quality are invited together into a warm space to speak their minds, a wealth of real stories emerge. The Reading Room is available for public access for the duration of the WACK! exhibition. On Saturday, June 16, the sound installation will be matched with a potluck dinner for the women’s groups and their invited guests to celebrate the women’s stories.

Visitors to the exhibition listen to women’s conversations on iPod headsets as they look at a photo album containing a portrait of each women’s group.

Photos by Sara Daleiden