VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presents their  November Artful Thursday: “Dear Diary: A Conversation with Lynn Hershman Leeson,” Thursday, Nov, 2011 at 6:30 PM, at the Caroline Wiess Law Building.  Presented by Lynn Hershman Leeson, Chair of the \ Film Department at the San Francisco Art Institute, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis, and an A. D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.

Performance artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson has been a prolific voice in the Feminist Art Movement. Renowned for her avatar, Roberta Breitmore—which she enacted long before the digital revolution—Hershman Leeson once described the subject of her work as the “psyche fleshed out as the female body.” Her most recent project, the 2010 documentary !Women Art Revolution (!WAR), offers a penetrating look at the women artists who led the fight to end centuries of artistic discrimination.

At the November Artful Thursday, Hershman Leeson shows an episode from The Electronic Diary—an ongoing project since 1986 that blurs the boundaries between her own life and art—and talks with Richard Herskowitz (Cinema Arts Festival director) and Jenni Sorkin (University of Houston assistant professor of contemporary art and critical studies) about the politicizing of women artists in the context of her own multifaceted career.

Afterward, see !Women Art Revolution in its entirety at 8 pm in the MFAH Brown Auditorium Theater as part of the 2011 Cinema Arts Festival Houston. Tickets available at www.houstoncinemartsociety.org  or at the MFAH box office.

Pictured:  Lynn Hershman Leeson, External Transformations: Roberta's Construction Chart, No. 1, from the series Roberta Breitmore, 1974–78, dye transfer print. Courtesy of Lynn Hershman Leeson.