Lynn Hershman Leeson

Lynn Hershman Leeson
Investigations / !Women Art Revolution
Kuratoren: Howard Oransky, Siri Engberg

Over the last three decades, Leeson has been internationally recognized for her pioneering use of new technologies and her investigations of issues that are now seen 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.

Lynn Hershman Leeson: Investigations brings together three key projects spanning the trajectory of the artist's career to date: Roberta Breitmore (1974–78) in which the artist created, lived and documented the life of a fictional persona; Lorna (1983–84), the first interactive art video allowing users make choices for an agoraphobic protagonist; and RAW/WAR (2011), a user-generated living archive and constantly evolving interactive history of women artists and feminist art.

Exhibition co-curated by Howard Oransky of the Katherine E. Nash Gallery, Lynn Lukkas of the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota, and Siri Engberg of the Walker Art Center. Co-sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota.

Work by 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, and the Walker Art Center, in addition to celebrated private collections. Commissions include projects for the Tate Modern, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, De Young Museum, Daniel Langois and Stanford University, and Charles Schwab. 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 a retrospective at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. Her three feature films, Strange Culture, Teknolust, and Conceiving Ada, have screened in the Sundance Film Festival and The Berlin International Film Festival, among others, and have won numerous awards.

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 the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship. In 2004 Stanford University Libraries acquired her working archive. Leeson lives and works in San Francisco.

Leeson's new film !Women Art Revolution (!W.A.R.) is a documentary that combines interviews, artwork, and rarely seen archival film and video footage, collected over the past 40 years, to detail the evolution of the feminist art movement in the United States from 1968 to the present. The film ties the feminist art movement to 1960s anti-war and civil rights demonstrations, showing 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.

!W.A.R. also exposes major developments in women's art during the 1970s, including the opening of alternative art spaces such as the AIR Gallery in New York and the Los Angeles Woman's Building. Chronicling the work of activists in recent decades, the film focuses on the Guerrilla Girls, the Women's Art Coalition and other similar groups, as well as the publications and spaces they've engendered. Written, directed, narrated and edited by Leeson, !Women Art Revolution is distributed nationwide by Zeitgeist Films.