00:00When you're a woman, it's hard to tell that you're being censored when you're not in a museum to begin with.
00:16It was a sculpture annual, and people said, oh, there are no women who make sculpture. The usual silly business.
00:22Well, we just got mad, and we said, we're mad. We're not taking it anymore.
00:27I'm here with Lynn Hirschman Leeson, who's made a documentary film. You're an artist and documentary filmmaker, yeah? Right? Okay, good.
00:35Who's made a film about a really interesting slice of counterculture you don't hear a lot about, feminist art.
00:42And not only that, it's 40 years in the making.
00:471968. One year after the summer of love, America was still in Vietnam.
00:54While at home, the Black Panthers, civil rights, and free speech movements were only part of the subterranean agitations.
01:04Another revolution was in progress.
01:06What this film does is address really that vacuousness and the empty history and the silences of oppression that kept the story from being told.
01:18Three dimensional ceramic art of 39 women's vaginal area, their genitalia, served up on plates that requires a whole room in order to display weird sexual art.
01:32I'm a poet, and I do have trouble with this because it's not art. It is not art. It's pornography.
01:38At one point, I guess it was in the 70s, they wanted to do a show of lesbian art, but it was hard to find artists who identified as lesbians. Talk about that a little bit.
01:46It was so difficult to be an artist in those days that people would not identify as artists.
01:54You know, they were identifying as lesbians, but they didn't want to come out as artists.
01:59Why? Tell me. I don't know anything about that.
02:01You know, it was kind of like, it was just a low level of being, you know, to come out in public.
02:08A lot of people took fake names or they used their initials so that they wouldn't be identified as who they were as artists or so that they would be gender neutral.
02:17Was it part of not wanting to be heard as a lesbian?
02:22No, I think that it was a process of coming out in general.
02:27For instance, Arlene Raven, you know, worked at CalArts and worked in the arts and worked as a critic.
02:33And then she came out as a lesbian and then she started, and the same with Harmony Hammond.
02:38She was married and had children and then came out as a lesbian and now is lesbian identified and wrote a book about it, in fact.
02:45So, you know, I think it was a process.
02:48So art makes you lesbian.
02:50We had this idea to do a kind of political art that didn't just point to something and complain and say, this is wrong.
02:58We had an idea to try to twist issues around and use facts and humor and change people's minds about the issues.
03:07Has anything changed for women making art today?
03:10I think so.
03:11I think that it's easier, you know, that you can't have women in galleries and women are starting to sell their work for more money, not as much as they deserve.
03:23Which is why I say you should buy women's art now because it's only going to go up.
03:28And so I see the inroads are there.
03:33The Museum of Modern Art had no female curators five years ago and they have over 30 now.
03:39Wow.
03:40And I think when you see women in their 30s, 20s in positions where they can make a change, they're doing it.
