Lynn Hershman Leeson. !Women Art Revolution

Lynn Hershman Leeson was a freshly radicalized graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, when the Free Speech Movement began in 1964. She felt an urgency to capture the moral fervor. “It was a time,” the artist said, “that women were beginning to find their own identity and realize that they even had one. And not only did they have an identity, but they had no history.”¹ In her documentary !Women Art Revolution (2010), Hershman Leeson, whose practice centers around issues of self and identity, used video technology to form identity and history through documentation. For more than forty years, she has interviewed women artists and curators, recording and archiving a seminal history of women’s art in the second half of the twentieth century.