Lynn Hershman Leeson

1941 | Cleveland, Ohio, United States

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Lynn Hershman Leeson — AWARE Women artists / Femmes artistes

Portrait of Lynn Hershman Leeson, © Photo: Henny Garfunkel, Courtesy of the artist; Altman Siegel, San Francisco; and Bridget Donahue, New York

√ Audiovisual √ Film √ Installation √ Performance √ Video √ Autobiography √ Women's status √ Feminism √ Science √ North America √ United States √ 1960s √ 1970s √ 1980s √ 1990s √ 2000s √ 2010s √ 20th century √ 21st century

American media artist and filmmaker.

There is no singular portrait of Lynn Hershman Leeson. The artist has confronted the politics of gender, identity, and individuality through the many female characters, cyborgs, and bots that she has created, and even the identities she has assumed over her decades-long career. In 1968, L. Hershman Leeson published critiques of her work and other women artists in art journals under the names of fictional critics. The artist and others transformed into Roberta Breitmore from 1973 to 1978 as a private performance. Breitmore was an invented persona who undertook real-life activities then considered typical of a single woman. The plurality of self in L. Hershman Leeson’s work challenges our social constructs and representation of the female identity, often in response to the exclusionary treatment and gender biases experienced by women artists. She moved to the Bay Area to pursue her graduate studies during the height of the feminist movement. Objecting to the lack of support and recognition from museums and galleries, she forged alternative spaces for exhibiting new media and other artworks not accepted by conventional institutions at the time, such as staging the site-specific installation The Dante Hotel (1973) with Eleanor Coppola. L. Hershman Leeson also established The Floating Museum(1974–1978), a temporary museum supporting artists’ visions and work outside traditional museum structures by commissioning projects for public spaces.

Since the 1980s, the artist has been experimenting with various media and innovative platforms, from video, film, interactive, and web-based art to artificial intelligence and biotechnologies. She first included touchscreen technology in the interactive videodisk installation Deep Contact (1984–1989). She invented virtual sets for making Conceiving Ada(1998) before film productions commonly used similar technologies. In the early 1990s, she started engaging the internet as an artistic medium and applying it to web-based projects such as the artificially intelligent virtual chatbot Agent Ruby (1998–2002). Built using Artificial Intelligence Markup Language, Agent Ruby embodies a female face and a personality. The conversations between Ruby and online users shape the virtual entity’s memory, knowledge, and shifting moods. In the 2000s, L. Hershman Leeson began critically exploring the possibilities of genetic engineering. Her research culminated in the complex project multi-room installation Infinity Engine (2014). Room #8 (2006–2018), the last installation room of the project, contains a vial of synthetic DNA with an archival record of the artist’s videos and films as binary data packets—her artistic oeuvre broken down into molecules in storage—and another vial of artificially engineered antibody that bears the name “LYNN HERSHMAN” in its molecular structure. She observes that antibodies are like artists—agents seeking after toxins in culture and radically infiltrating the body itself in an attempt to create a cure.

For L. Hershman Leeson, art has to be political or “why do it otherwise? I think that there is an opportunity in art to take risks, and it can therefore have tremendous resonance.” Politics is always present in her work, which presciently reveals the impact of technological advancements on society, including investigations into the influence and ethical boundaries of technologies like surveillance, censorship, and bioscience. Her pioneering work is represented in public collections worldwide and her archives were acquired by the Stanford University Special Collections Library in 2004. She was awarded the Siemens Art Award at Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in 1995; the prestigious Golden Nica award at Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria in 1999; and an Honorary Doctorate from Pratt Institute of Art, New York in 2023. She received a special mention from the Jury for her participation in the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.

Karen Cheung

A biography produced as part of the programme “Living with two brains: Women in New Media Art, 1960s-1990s”