Women Art Revolution

This is a wonderful film. It plunges you right into the middle of it all - it gives you a real feeling of the excitement of the women's revolution in the making. You can feel that it's made by a participant in the scene - and although the filmmaker never intrudes, she does make herself fabulously known after all.

The film includes lots of different artists, but it is organized along thematic lines, so you aren't just reviewing a cast of "characters" as in so many worthy but predictable documentaries. Instead you're engaging with a range of different issues that the artists attacked. Made with panache, humor, and smarts, it is an invaluable tribute to the times. The form fits the content, and the content is moving, stimulating, and inspiring, as a history and as an illumination of art-making and artists.

Don't miss this truly great documentary, a most amazing, totally unique and deeply inspirational film by Lynn Hershman Leeson (Teknolust, Strange Culture), which will stand alone as a history lesson in gender politics and how that plays out in the art world. It is playing NOW, for a short run at the Lumiere Theatre on California St. in San Francisco. Hershman Leeson has spent 40 years collecting legacy footage and pursuing interviews to make this rare gem, which reveals the unknown history of women's art and the ostracism of major female artists from mainstream acceptance by museums & major galleries, solely because of their gender. I loved it and would gladly see it multiple times!

Where are the paintings? Where are the sculptures?

It's about the talk. It's about feminism. It's about Civil Right's. It's about "The Movement". It's about politics. It's about the 60's.

It's all superficial. Short 30 second sound bytes from artists. Then on to another sound byte. Doesn't look at anything in any detail. Discusses briefly "The Dinner Party" with some congressional footage – then moves quickly on to another topic lest we become bored.

Avant Garde performance "art" is tossed in to entertain us – lest we become bored.

Nothing on Frieda Kahlo. Nothing on Kiki Smith. Nothing on Rosa Bonheur. Nothing on Camille Claudel. Nothing on Georgia O'Keefe. Nothing on Carole A. Feuerman. Nothing on Mary Pratt...

Kathe Kollwitz only gets a brief sound byte lest we become bored.

Does not mention the National Museum of Women in the Arts (founded in 1981).

Women artists are not just from the U.S.

Women artists didn't just start in the 1960's.