After climbing four narrow flights of stairs, I enter Bonnie Lucas’s SoHo apartment/studio, a three hundred-square-foot-or-so homage to her own life. The walls are teeming with art; her desk is covered in beads, bows, severed doll heads, and what looks like several lifetimes’ worth of glue. As Lucas shows me around, I can’t help but think she is the epitome of an artist, a person whose creativity does not begin and end on a canvas but spills all over everything she touches. Even after forty years of living and working in this single room, Lucas has no intention of retiring elsewhere.
“When I was in grad school, an artist came to give a talk,” Lucas tells me. “This woman said, ‘Develop a set of habits to achieve your dreams. There is no such thing as luck. You have to work.’” So Lucas works—often in gouache on paper and more often in collaged assemblages of girly toys and garments. Her primary subject is femininity because “girl culture hasn’t gotten the recognition that boy culture has.” We valorize girls doing boy culture—“Little League sports and fishing and taking apart radios”—while girl culture remains “marginalized, rejected as being silly and soft.” Still, Lucas doesn’t impose too much seriousness on her pinkly pretty creations: “I’m always poking fun at us. I love taking the heads off girls,” she says, pointing at a headless Snow White with a snake peeking out under her skirt. “The snake,” Lucas stage-whispers, “it’s very sexual.”
If Lucas treats her subject matter with a light touch, her commitment to her craft is serious as a heart attack—an obsession, perhaps, or the truest of true love. Passion runs through every sparkling bead and meticulously swirled ribbon in the years of art surrounding us as we chat.
“You know that famous song ‘What I Did for Love’ from A Chorus Line?” she says. “The backup dancers sing it. They will never be famous or make money, but they do it for love. I’ve made hundreds of things for love,” she adds.
