Suzanne Lacy, Jean Nathan, _____________(New Orleans, 1981-2)
The Women’s Caucus for the Arts was faced with a dilemma. Its parent organization, the College Art Association, was planning to host the annual conference in New Orleans in a state that had refused to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment for women. At the time women had organized national boycotts against these states. Should the WCA boycott, or go to New Orleans to support the women artists there?

Lacy was invited by the WCA planning committee to stage a conference-as-boycott-as-performance, which included exhibitions of activist feminist work, a local news campaign on the ERA, long-term organizing with cross-racial groups of women, behind-the-scenes strategic luncheons with the governor, a boycott of local hotels and restaurants in favor of lodging with local women and eating food from women caterers, and Lacy’s keystone performance that kicked off the conference. Southern women heralded the opening of the WCA conference with a giant potluck—500 women from different racial, social, religious and occupational backgrounds celebrated their personal and collective heritage in an unprecedented coalition.

The performance began in December with eight women from the community. Six weeks of intensive person-to-person organizing was accomplished by a series of small "chain letter” dinners (each guest hosting her own subsequent dinner). An incredible array of different women attended the final “banquet” in the elegant Old U.S. Mint: professionals and housewives, “old family” dowagers and working waitresses, black nuns and radical lesbians and women immigrants from Latin America, women from seven years old to ninety. They played jazz, gospels, Cajun, and historical popular music; poets read from their works; and twelve costumed actresses performed the lives of women of various ethnicities important in the region’s history.