For three weeks, Lacy collected reports from the police and printed the word RAPE in red capital letters on a map to coincide with the incident locations. Lacy's original intentions were to broadcast locations of said violence while expressing women's feelings, and/or personal experiences with rape. Three Weeks in May was a mixed media performance piece that sought to examine sexual violence and end societal silence surrounding rape. As she explained in 2019, "I don't care as much about art as I care about human trafficking." The work illustrates the strong ethics that have underpinned her entire career, social impact often more important than the endurance of its artistic value. 'The Life' as it was called wasn't far from mine." In 2010, Lacy reinvented Prostitution Notes as a performed reading of her original drawings for the Serpentine Gallery's Map Marathon in London. Rather, I would locate the work inside my own experiences and record the process of my research. I didn't want to flirt with their reality as a performance, or to relate their stories as an anthropologist might. I'm amazed, since I've passed it hundreds of times." She added, that "Most of what we knew at that time came from literature and films that greatly glamorized the life. Sunset at Highland is a very hot spot for hooking. Lacy wrote, "The street corners, restaurants and bars of Los Angeles took on a new appearance. The work also highlighted our communal denial of aspects of society that exist alongside us in our everyday life. By the end of the project, ten large diagrams emerged depicting the psychosocial spaces Lacy uncovered, recording the language and power dynamics of the relationships involved.
The work was a combination of performance, subjectivity, and research that acted as a record of her emotional response to what she learned. She meticulously wrote down what she was told, took photos of the location of the interviews, and recorded what everyone ate, collecting matchbooks, stickers, and other mementoes. With Prostitution Notes, Lacy sought to examine sex work not as stand-alone subject, but rather to locate the experience of prostitutes within her own life, "looking for echoes of their lives in mine." To accomplish this, she spent four months in Los Angeles interviewing friends, contacts, and sex workers at various restaurants and cafes about their opinions and experiences in regards to prostitution.
This encompasses the education of police departments about the realities of rape and her current position as teacher at the University of Southern California's Roski School of Art & Design. The success of Lacy's career cannot be measured in physical artworks, concrete documentation, or a resume dotted with gallery exhibitions but rather, by the important shifts in social climate her work has contributed to manifesting.Her creative tools consist of data collection, research, observation, assimilation, and reporting methodologies. Lacy's key techniques as an artist are similar to those used by seasoned journalists, psychologists (she has an educational background), and social anthropologists.With a career that resonates with the witch or shaman archetype, Lacy represents those women of our society who dwell purposefully, without regard to fame or fortune, orchestrating healing and positive evolution by holding up a mirror to humanity that expresses its communal shadows, and that which might otherwise go unspoken.A pioneer in Identity Art and Identity Politics, Lacy's work has helped spotlight the circumstances and experiences of groups of people who, for whatever reason, are in need of political alliances separate from traditional broad-based party lines in order to gain exposure toward their concerns and issues.Although this time established her first and foremost as a feminist, her altruistic passions would spread their tendrils into an artistic oeuvre that focused on helping all marginalized peoples. Coming of age during an important cross section of feminism and art in the late '60s and early '70s informed Lacy's pivotal work with Judy Chicago and the seminal Woman's Building in Los Angeles.
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