!WAR: WOMEN ART REVOLUTION

A film by Lynn Hershman Leeson.

About !WAR:

"For over forty years, Director Lynn Hershman Leeson has collected hundreds of hours of interviews with visionary artists, historians, curators and critics who shaped the beliefs and values of the Feminist Art Movement and reveal previously undocumented strategies used to politicize female artists and integrate women into art structures.

!Women Art Revolution elaborates the relationship of the Feminist Art Movement to the 1960s anti-war and civil rights movements and explains how historical events, such as the all-male protest exhibition against the invasion of Cambodia, sparked the first of many feminist actions against major cultural institutions. The film details major developments in women’s art of the 1970s, including the first feminist art education programs, political organizations and protests, alternative art spaces such as the A.I.R. Gallery and Franklin Furnace in New York and the Los Angeles Women’s Building, publications such as Chrysalis and Heresies, and landmark exhibitions, performances, and installations of public art that changed the entire direction of art.

New ways of thinking about the complexities of gender, race, class, and sexuality evolved. The Guerrilla Girls emerged as the conscience of the art world and held academic institutions, galleries, and museums accountable for discrimination practices. Over time, the tenacity and courage of these pioneering women artists resulted in what many historians now feel is the most significant art movement of the late 20th century.

Carrie Brownstein composed an original score to accompany the film. Laurie Anderson, Janis Joplin, Sleater-Kinney, The Gossip, Erase Errata and Tribe 8 are some of the gifted musicians who contributed to our soundtrack."

I say, "Bring it on!"



find out more on www.womenartrevolution.com


About Lynn Hershman Leeson:

Over the last three decades, artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson has been
internationally acclaimed for her pioneering use of new technologies and her
investigations of issues that are now recognized as key to the working of our society: identity in a time of consumerism, privacy in an era of surveillance, interfacing of humans and machines, and the relationship between real and virtual worlds.

In 2007 a retrospective at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, Autonomous Agents,
featured a comprehensive range– from the Roberta Breitmore series (1974-78) to
videos from the 1980s and interactive installations that use the Internet and artificial intelligence software. Her influential early ventures into performance and photographyare also featured in the current touring exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, organized by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.



Secret Agents Private I, The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson was
published by The University of California Press in 2005 on the occasion of
another retrospective at the Henry Gallery in Seattle. Her three feature films-
Strange Culture, Teknolust, Conceiving Ada- have been part of the Sundance Film Festival and The Berlin International Film Festival, among others, and have won numerous awards.

Work by Lynn Hershman Leeson is featured in the public collections of the
Museum of Modern Art, the William Lehmbruck Museum, the ZKM (Zentrum fur
Kunst und Medientechnologie), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the
National Gallery of Canada, the Walker Art Center and the University Art
Museum, Berkeley, in addition to the celebrated private collections of Donald
Hess and Arturo Schwarz, among many others. Commissions include projects for
the Tate Modern, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, De Young Museum, Daniel Langois and Stanford University, and Charles Schwab.

Recently honored with grants from Creative Capital and the National Endowment
for the Arts, she is also the recipient of a Siemens International Media Arts
Award, the Flintridge Foundation Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual
Arts, Prix Ars Electronica, and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Feature Film Prize. In
2004 Stanford University Libraries acquired Hershman Leeson’s working archive.

Hershman Leeson is Chair of the Film Department at the San Francisco Art Institute, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis and an A.D. White Professor at Large at Cornell University.

source: www.lynnhershman.com