!Women Art Revolution

!Women Art Revolution is a 2010 documentary film directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson and distributed by Zeitgeist Films. It tracks the feminist art movement over 40 years through interviews with artists, curators, critics, and historians. Synopsis !Women Art Revolution is a documentary film, created by Lynn Hershman Leeson, to examine the under-recognized world of feminist art. Through interviews, documentary footage, and artworks, the film tracks the trajectory of feminist art. It begins at the start of the 1960s with antiwar and civil rights protests, it follows developments in feminist art through the 1970s. Lynn Hershman Lesson interviewed artists, curators, critics, and historians for over 4 decades about their individual and group efforts to help women succeed in the art world and society by helping them overcome obstacles. There were over 40 individuals interviewed for the project. These interviews are done in a variety of places over time. The interviewees talk about their experiences in the art world facing obstacles because of their gender. Many of the artists discuss the works they made as a result. The movie begins with a scene at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where Hershman asks people to name 3 women artists; very few can name more than Frida Kahlo. Hershman calls the film the, "remains of an insistent history that refuses to wait any longer to be told." She says the events of the day led her to feel an, "urgency to capture that moment" and shoot whenever, wherever with a borrowed camera. The film gets its name from Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), which formed in the 1960s as a coalition to raise awareness about the unique obstacles faced by female artists. Many of the issues started at a fundamental level, Rachel Rosenthal states in the movie, with the women artists not getting recognition in the study of art history and books. The interviewees all talk about how male-dominated the art world was, sharing their personal stories. The work these feminist artists were creating at the time were very different from works shown or talked about at the time.