Artist/curator Anna Muessig hosts filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson and artist/producer Alex Chowaniec in a discussion about art and feminism, woman and creativity, activism across generations, and historical legacies.
Lynn Hershman Leeson’s film !Women Art Revolution (!W.A.R.) will have its theatrical premiere at New York City’s IFC Center on June 1, 2011 (one week only). !W.A.R. had the rare honor to screen at three prestigious festivals: the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival, the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, and the Berlin Film Festival. The film will show at Los Angeles’ Laemmle's Music Hall (June 17-23) with a national release to follow.
Forty-two years in the making, !W.A.R. charts the history of the Feminist Art Movement in America from the 1960s to the present and illuminates how this under-explored movement radically transformed the art and culture of our times. Featuring an original score by Carrie Brownstein (formerly of Sleater-Kinney), the film includes appearances by countless groundbreaking figures such as Marcia Tucker, Nancy Spero, Silvia Sleigh, Carolee Schneemann, Miriam Schapiro, B. Ruby Rich, Yvonne Rainer, Yoko Ono, Miranda July, The Guerrilla Girls, Judy Chicago and many others.
To accompany the movie, legendary underground cartoonist Spain Rodriguez has illustrated a 100-page graphic novel depicting selected highlights of the !WAR history and including a 57-page curriculum guide.
In addition to RAW/WAR, the complete interviews from !W.A.R. have been archived at the Stanford University Special Collections and are freely available to the general public for online viewing. These include 300 hours of raw footage, providing the first-person histories of pioneering individuals who challenged the ways in which women were considered by the reigning art establishment. http://lib.stanford.edu/women-art-revolution.
Anna Muessig works at the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, serves as part of the leadership team of the public art organization Nuit Blanche New York and the Greene Hill Food Co-op, and will begin a Master in City Planning degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in fall, 2011.
