Jolla, California. Against the backdrop of the Pacific Ocean, the blue sky, and swooping seagulls, they talked about the problems and pleasures of aging. Three years later on Mother's Day 1987, 430 older women dressed in black sat at tables which formed color squares against a black-carpeted background. Under the faceted windows covering the prestigious courtyard of the central commercial building of downtown Minneapolis, the women formed a "living quilt" and talked again about the pleasures and problems of aging. Although the visual images were dramatically different, the connections between the two performances are obvious. Both the California Whisper, the Waves, the Wind and the Minnesota Crystal Quilt were conceived and executed by the artist Suzanne Lacy and are thematically related to her ongoing concern with creating artworks that address major social issues and give voice to the disadvantaged, ignored women of contemporary American society. Both were elaborate performances requiring the assistance of many people and the expenditure of much money during extensive preparation periods. And both had the rather unusual attention of a resident anthropologist engaged in the classical anthropological fieldwork practice of participant observation. In 1983 I was glad to respond to Lacy's invitation to serve on an advisory board for the Whisper Project, but then requested that I be permitted to extend my participation toward a scholarly study of the structure of the organization being formed to facilitate the performance. I was interested in many issues, but especially in the preparation process and in the development of an organization of volunteers oriented toward expediting a specific and unfamiliar goal. My primary focus, then, was on issues of social organization and process, but ancillary interests were relevant and included a desire to examine feminist contentions about female collaborative art making as distinct from the patriarchal model of the autonomous artist. I also wished to explore the manifest and latent symbolic content and the cultural metaphors embedded in both the performance and in the preparation as performance, and examine how the symbols were manipulated and expressed toward goal realization. Because I was resident in San Diego county during the months of preparation for the La Jolla performance, I was able to observe all aspects of the process, assist in the performance, and then, for six subsequent months, carry on a series of extended interviews with about twenty-five partici-