2011 Sundance Docs in Focus: !WOMEN ART REVOLUTION

Lynn Hershman Leeson brings one of two documentaries to this year’s New Frontier on-screen offerings, !WOMEN ART REVOLUTION, a decades-in-the-making examination of the development of feminist art in the US.

Sundance Program Description:

In the 1960s, women artists formed the Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), a coalition to cope with exclusion from museum exhibitions, art journals, educational literature, and historical documentation. The cost of this exclusion is still felt today. In 2006, even after the success of women artists such as Barbara Kreuger, Shirin Neshat, and Cindy Sherman, a poll of Whitney Museum patrons found most of them could not name three women artists.

Deftly combining reportage and personal memoir, !WOMEN ART REVOLUTION is a seminal and groundbreaking documentary excavating the evolution of the Feminist Art Movement in America. Director Lynn Hershman Leeson was an active participant in this movement and has spent 42 years documenting it. Through intimate interviews, provocative art, and rarely seen historical film and video footage, she illuminates what many historians feel is the most significant art movement of the late-twentieth century.

!WOMEN ART REVOLUTION is part of a transmedia project that includes RAW/WAR, a website and participatory installation. Visit RAW/WAR at New Frontier.

Some Background:
Hershman Leeson is no newcomer to Sundance, having brought films to Park City since the late 1990s – CONCEIVING ADA (1997), TEKNOLUST (2002), and, most recently, STRANGE CULTURE (2007).

Why You Should Watch:
Hershman Leeson has been conducting the treasure trove of interviews featured in !WOMEN ART REVOLUTION across the span of her entire career and finally assembled them in their present form, giving audiences intimate, direct access to the principal creative forces behind feminist art, and contextualizing, both historically and sociopolitically, the reasons for its development as a movement.

Screening Info:
For screening dates and times at Sundance, click the link in the first paragraph above. The film also has an official website to help keep audiences updated on future screenings and other developments.