About

Dr. Lācis specializes in post-war and contemporary American and European art. Her research and writing interests center around how participation, creative partnerships, appropriation, authorship, the construct of the studio, performance/performativity, and celebrity function both historically and in the contemporary moment. Exploring dynamics between artists, audiences, institutions, and mass media, Dr. Lācis is particularly interested in museum and gallery spaces as distinct worlds unto themselves. Dr. Lācis’s curatorial work features a wide breadth of artists, including such figures as Emma Amos, Maria Gaspar, Deb Kass, Sol LeWitt, Christina Quarles, Robert Rauschenberg, Xaviera Simmons, Julian Stanczak, Andy Warhol, and Esther Pearl Watson, among many others. Often approaching curatorial work and art writing as a form of collaborative storytelling, Dr. Lācis’s current writing highlights contemporary art in Cleveland (see examples of her criticism here, here, here, and here). Her most recent work as a curatorial consultant will culminate in the fall 2024 opening of beLONGING: Lithuanian Artists in Chicago, 1900 to Now, funded by the Terra Foundation and organized by the Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture in Chicago, IL.

For nearly fifteen years Dr. Lācis has worked at the intersection of academia and the mainstream museum, curating more than two dozen solo, group, and collection-based exhibitions at such institutions as moCa Cleveland (as Emily Hall Tremaine Curatorial Fellow, 2007 – 2010); SPACES (Cleveland, OH), where she organized the late William Pope.L’s participatory performance PULL! in 2013 (with Kate Sopko; Christopher Lynn, and hundreds of volunteers); and at the Cleveland Museum of Art, where she provided research support for the international traveling exhibition, Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse (Royal Academy of Arts, London & CMA, 2014 – 2016). From 2016 to 2022, Dr. Lācis served as Director of Exhibitions at Western Michigan University’s Richmond Center for Visual Arts
(RCVA). Curatorial highlights there include We’ve Only Just Begun: Celebrating a Century of Collecting at Western Michigan University (2022); Esther Pearl Watson, Safer at Home: Pandemic Paintings (2021); an historical exhibition, Spiral: Up & Out, featuring the 1960s New York City-based African- American activist group (2019); the Midwest premiere of Los Angeles-based painter Christina Quarles, Yew Jumped too Deep, Yew Buried the Lead (2019); a major group show featuring artists who confront
issues of mass incarceration, On the Inside Out (2018); and Site & Survey: The Architecture of Landscape (2017), a poetic meditation about landscape, among other exhibitions. Acquisitions for WMU’s Art Collection by Dr. Lācis include prints by Emma Amos, Robyn O’Neil, Deb Kass, and Ashley Hunt, as well as fifty photographs by five Ukrainian artists—Igor Chekachkov, Alexander Chekmenev, Eugeny Kom, Vitaly Fomenko and Lana Yankovska.

Dr. Lācis earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in modern and contemporary art from the CWRU/CMA joint program in art history. Her writing appears in catalogs published by the Cleveland Museum of Art, moCa Cleveland, Western Michigan University, and CAN Journal in Cleveland. A forthcoming essay about the artist Rudolf Baranik will be published as part of an exhibition catalog organized by the Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture in Chicago and the Lithuanian National Museum of Art in Vilnius (2025). From 2014 to 2016, Dr. Lācis served as editor of ArtHopper.org, an online platform for art criticism in the Great Lakes area. In 2016 and 2018, she served as editor for two W2S catalogs funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and published by The Sculpture Center in Cleveland, OH.