LAVA’s Sunday Salon: Susanna Dakin, An Artist for President
On the last Sunday of each month, LAVA welcomes interested individuals to gather in downtown Los Angeles (noon-2pm), for a loosely structured conversational Salon featuring short presentations and opportunities to meet and connect with one another. If you’re interested in joining LAVA as a creative contributor or an attendee, we recommend Salon attendance as an introduction to this growing community.
Special program at the November 27 Salon:
• LAVA Visionary SUSANNA DAKIN is a sculptor, performance artist, writer and once upon a time publisher of artists’ books, magazines and a community newspaper. She is currently on the Board of the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, California. She has taught sculpture and drawing, exhibited both in solo and group shows, and completed a few large-scale sculpture commissions. She has done several unique performance pieces at various venues in southern California. Dakin’s most well known work was a year-long performance campaign around the United States as “An Artist for President” in 1983-84, in which she advanced the idea that “The Nation is the art work and we the people are the artists.” The book about that campaign, as timely today as it was then, is being published in fall 2011. Dakin will reprise the campaign as a book tour. About “An Artist for President”: In 1984, Reagan was running for his second-term, while pursuing what would become a relentless, multi-decades long retreat from democratic ideals. Susanna Dakin, sculptor, performance artist and High Performance Magazine publisher, had an outlandish notion: she declared with the Federal Elections Commission as an Artist/Candidate for President of the United States. Now a compelling and high-entertaining book, as timely today as it was then, An Artist for President makes a case for the vital role of art and creativity in all aspects of life, including politics. This “biography of an event,” records the loony ideas people hold about woman, artists and the political process. November is Election Month, so cast your vote for art, civil liberties and freedom of expression, by attending this fun refection on where we’ve been and where we’re going.