Women Art Revolution, a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson

Lynn Hershmann Leeson. Photo by Tatiana Bazzichelli

I met Lynn Hershman Leeson in her studio in California Street for an interview for my PhD research during my visiting scholarship in San Francisco / Stanford. I got to know her through Henrik Bennetsen of the Stanford Humanities Lab. She invited me at the San Francisco Art Institute to attend a preview-screening of her upcoming film: Women Art Revolution, which is currently in post-production. After the screening we got a questionnaire, to give her our first impressions on the film. The film, coming out in the Fall of this year, is about the evolution of the Feminist Art Movement in the United States. I was very impressed by the comprehensive works of Lynn, by the amount of interviews with women artists she did in the course of the past thirty years,  and how, already in the Seventies, she managed to develop one of the first experiments in the  creation of multiple identities, transforming her own life in the one of her alter ego: Roberta Breitmore.

My interview with Lynn is going to be published in the upcoming summer issue of Leonardo Electronic Almanac. Here is an excerpt of it:

“Lynn artistic work starting in the Sixties investigated the transformation of the social itself. Through her artificially constructed alter-egos, active both in real and virtual life, cultural symbols are recomposed according to unedited modalities. Gender power structures, the representation of subjectivity, or the artificial construction of identities – all these have found perfect balance in her works.
Lynn Hershman Leeson has created a critical reflection, putting her body on the performance stage through more than thirty years, starting in the seventies with the creation of the multiple personality Roberta Breitmore, and continuing through her works into this day with her upcoming film about the Women Art Revolution. They stress the cultural implication of gender in daily life, rewriting the codes of art and technology. Dynamics of interaction, dialogue and collective exchange acquire a particular relevance in her works”.

More info about Lynn’s work are here: www.lynnhershman.com

Check the film website: womenartrevolution.com