The Brooklyn Rail

There is only one Lynn Hershman Leeson—and she is many.

In her first published book, Private I: A Memoir, we meet Hershman Leeson the child who didn’t speak until she was seven, Hershman Leeson the fast-maturing sister who regularly sought refuge in the Cleveland Art Museum as a way to escape her volatile home life, and Hershman Leeson the “gifted-child” who once cut off her own hair intending to fashion a paintbrush that would let her “paint like [J.M.W.] Turner” after discovering his work. These early fragments are not just stories of childhood. They also foreshadow the complex, inventive, and radical gestures that would define her art.

Soon, another Hershman Leeson emerges: the young woman set up with her brother’s friend, Larry, whom she marries and follows to Berkeley. Yes, Berkeley in the 1960s—where she gives birth to her daughter and begins a Bay Area artistic practice that will shape not only her own career but also lay groundwork for generations of artists working at the intersection of art and technology (myself included).

The Bay Area connection is crucial. For her, but, as it turns out, for us too. She writes:

Had I stayed in Cleveland, or Los Angeles, or moved to New York, my work might not have used technology. Rooted in the Bay Area, and close to Silicon Valley, I realized that the future would be computer-driven, and that art could be made from this burgeoning technological landscape, using coding tools to tell stories.

Place matters. It is here, after surviving a near-death health crisis, that she befriends Eleanor (Ellie) Coppola. Their lifelong friendship and collaboration become both personal anchor and political engine, dedicated to amplifying women artists like themselves. Hershman Leeson’s stories from this period highlight her experimental approach to making (at times even inventing) new forms of art and her resourcefulness as a motivated feminist artist struggling to gain visibility in a male-dominated art world.

Finding Herself in Art

In an early series of work, “Breathing Machines” (1967–68), she embedded sound and sensors in sculpture, work that would be reconfigured into an installation for her first serious exhibition presented at Berkeley’s University Art Museum in 1972. These works partly grew out of her own difficulties breathing as far back as third grade and again at age twenty-three when she was three months pregnant. Yet through it all, she felt compelled to prioritize her experiments in art and technology: “Making art was my reason to breathe. I was using art to explore the varied personas women embody in contemporary society.”

That young woman stepped into her Berkeley show on opening day to find the gallery room empty. She rushed to find the exhibition curator, Peter Selz, demanding to know why her work was no longer there. Selz told her that the museum’s chief curator, Brenda Richardson, had declared to him that “sound is not art.” The exhibition was canceled. This is nearly a decade before video and sound art would be taken seriously in celebrated exhibitions like Sound Art (1979) at the Museum of Modern Art, curated by the now-renowned Barbara London.

Another work in the Berkeley exhibition, Abortion, featured two wax legs that peered out from beneath a sheet stained with human blood. Richardson deemed this work too political, which must have seemed deeply cynical to Hershman Leeson, given Berkeley’s reputation as the heart of the Free Speech Movement of the sixties. It was the year Title IX passed, and a year before Roe v. Wade (1973) was decided. It was two years before a woman could apply and receive her own credit card thanks to the Equal Credit Opportunity Act.

The label “Not Art” haunted her work for decades. “It is hard to describe what it felt like to be told that my work was considered ‘Not Art’,” she writes in the book. But for Hershman Leeson, these initial experiences with the art world would become a catalyst. What came next is one of the most iconic reinventions in twentieth-century art: Roberta Breitmore.

The Performance of Life

In 1973, Hershman Leeson started the Roberta Breitmore performance (1973– ), inspired by a Joyce Carol Oates short story (“Passions and Meditations”) that introduces a protagonist named Roberta Bright: a desperate character for whom Hershman Leeson felt great empathy. She decided to create her fictional persona, Roberta Breitmore, as a work of performance art, one that “would move in and out of reality, basing her identity on the evidence, traces, discards and artifacts that proved her existence.”

As Roberta, Hershman Leeson adopted a blond wig and heavy makeup, embodying a figure who was “clumsy, shy, and did not fit in anywhere.” Roberta opened a bank account, secured credit cards and a driver’s license, and worked part-time typing jobs. For almost ten years, this constructed identity was documented by photographer Edmund Shea, while Hershman Leeson even arranged her own surveillance to trace Roberta’s wanderings through the streets of San Francisco. Only later artists such as Sophie Calle would pursue their own surveillance-based projects including Suite Vénitienne (1979) and The Address Book (1983).

With the Roberta Breitmore project, Hershman Leeson does not merely create an alter ego; she invents an entire parallel existence: “Roberta was a double mirror. She simultaneously reflected and refracted society’s biases. Clothing, checks, credit cards, driver's license, psychiatric reports, diary entries, letters, tape recordings—all became the archived remains of her artificial life.”

Roberta’s “artificial life” signals what Hershman Leeson would continue to pursue for decades: the question of how identity, technology, and cultural systems co-construct one another. The project also reveals how far ahead she was in intuiting the contours of AI and artificial personhood. The “presentation of self in everyday life” was, of course, all too familiar to a woman navigating society and the art world, yet it’s also worth recalling the Cockettes—the influential drag troupe that emerged from 1970s San Francisco counterculture—whose performances similarly blurred the lines between persona, performance, and social critique.

Hershman Leeson’s Roberta offers an investigation of performative persona that brings to mind Fernando Pessoa’s “heteronyms,” literary characters for whom he developed unique biographies, writing styles and worldviews that were revealed in collections of poetry and prose that these personae wrote, through him. It takes the idea of method acting and folds it back on itself, so that artist is the method is the medium.

In this sense, Roberta is less a performance artifact than a prototype—a living rehearsal for the fractured identities that would later populate networked culture. Long before social media profiles, online avatars, or algorithmically generated “selves,” Hershman Leeson was stress-testing how identity could be both manufactured and surveilled, both embodied and dispersed. What once looked like a radical feminist intervention now reads like an early operating manual for the ways we inhabit digital space.

A Moving Image

The memoir illuminates with detail a complex life with many passages and associates: private film screenings at the Coppolas’ home where they hosted then-emerging directors like Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, and Werner Herzog; her unexpected oversight of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Running Fence (1972–76); her unprecedented artist-curator model as founder of the Floating Museum, a project that commissioned and exhibited temporary site-specific installations in nontraditional spaces; her special dinners and collaborations with Timothy Leary; and documentary films including the landmark !Women Art Revolution (2010), that weaves the history of feminist art over six decades, and Strange Culture (2007), that investigates the unfortunate circumstances of Critical Art Ensemble artist Steve Kurtz, who was accused of bioterrorism by the US government after his wife’s sudden death in 2004 led to the discovery of biological art materials in their home. These two documentaries highlight Hershman Leeson the activist, a socially engaged artist who doesn’t just gesture toward soul-crushing societal inequities and political persecution that permeate the art world, but who turns her directorial eye outward toward the power structures that artists, allies, and communities collectively resist.

In this riveting memoir, Hershman Leeson, whose solo show at Altman Siegel just closed, recounts the background story to some of her most significant film projects, including Conceiving Ada (1997) and Teknolust (2002). For Conceiving Ada—a film commissioned by ZDF, the German public broadcast network—she envisioned a film that time-travels between the Victorian era and the contemporary moment. At its center is Emmy Coer, a computer scientist obsessed with the life of Lady Ada Lovelace, the nineteenth-century mathematician widely regarded as the world’s first computer programmer. Emmy devises a way to communicate across time with Ada, who describes how the strictures of sexism and the demands of family life continually obstructed her work and kept her from receiving the recognition she deserved.

Emmy, too, can be seen to function as another persona through which Hershman Leeson tells her own story, this time directed toward Ada, who, as the artist admits after reading a book about Ada’s life, “astounded me.” While developing the project, Hershman Leeson realized that the only person who could possibly play both roles, Emmy and Ada, was Tilda Swinton. A lucky break put her in touch with the phenomenal actress, who agreed to take the role. They quickly became friends. She found in Swinton “a generous co-conspirator whose massive intelligence was matched by an uproarious sense of humor.” In one of the book’s best lines, she calls Swinton “a co-alien capable of trespassing into new worlds of our own invention.”

From here, it would be too easy to suggest that filmmaking is where Hershman Leeson’s practice “ended up.” But that misunderstands how her work actually functions. Hershman Leeson positions her films in direct conversation with her entire body of work. Sometimes this transmedia dialogue is literal, as with Agent Ruby, a companion website to Teknolust.

Interacting with the Agent Ruby website, the viewer who digs deeper discovers how that work too is in conversation with earlier works like Lorna (1979–84), the first interactive laser disc artwork examining agoraphobia and voyeurism, or subsequent works like her bio-art projects, which playfully confront the way bioengineering is reshaping human identity. These works extend her inquiry into how intimacy and vulnerability are mediated, from the psychological spaces we inhabit to the biological processes that define our very being. As is often the case with the most prolific artists who experiment across mediums and technological platforms, Hershman Leeson’s oeuvre is part of a continuum. Each work steps into and out of dialogue with those that precede it, while seeding what comes next.

Mediating Life

What’s astonishing, reading this memoir, is the sheer variety of technologies Hershman Leeson has engaged with across her career: video, interactive laser disc, bio-art, artificial intelligence, robotics, genetic science, virtual agents, feature film. Few artists have moved so fluidly across so many platforms, and fewer still have done so while making the technology itself the subject of critique.

The title Private I carries her wry humor and points at once to autobiography, surveillance culture, and to the ways our individual and collective “I” is scrutinized through an all-pervasive algorithmic apparatus. Her projects dissect how media shapes subjectivity, how surveillance capitalism colonizes daily life, and how multiple selves emerge within these networks of control. Yet however diverse the mediums or platforms she works in, what comes through is unmistakably Hershman Leeson. As we all think about the influence of Silicon Valley ideology penetrating our lives, Hershman Leeson’s memoir offers an opportunity to revisit her works and consider the ways she resisted the limitations society and technology tried to impose.

The deep research and creative process that accompanies the development of each artwork is not something that runs parallel to or is cleverly integrated into her life. It is a testament to the conviction that art offers a means of resilience for humans who might otherwise “abandon all hope” at the persistence of bias. Private I is not simply a recounting of career highlights. It is a living archive of multiplicity: child, artist, mother, collaborator, activist, film director, professor. Each persona is refracted through the others, and art is the refracting lens. In that sense, her art is her life, and she says as much: “If, in these pages, I describe my work more than my life, it is because I had no other life. I was so obsessed with making these works, having them fabricated and finishing them, that it was, quite literally, all I did.”

This is what makes the memoir so compelling. As an artist working on the outer edges of what is technically possible, Hershman Leeson (like the Guerrilla Girls) has been a vocal advocate for achieving gender parity in the art world. The stories she tells give the reader deep insight into the larger struggle that she, and her fellow feminist creators, have had to persevere through. When she says, “making art was my life force and gave me reason to live,” we get a glimpse into how art functions not only as critique, but also as solace—a commitment that persists regardless of visibility, market dictates, or conformity. As art historian Mark Polizzotti writes, “the price of comfort is often stagnation,” and with Hershman Leeson, there is never comfort—only a refusal to stagnate that allows the work to remain urgently of its time.

As readers, we encounter her work, the obstacles she faced, and the resilience that was required to continue her trajectory through the art world, with a mixture of humor, grit, and clarity. What emerges is not only an artist’s survival, but her insistence on making survival itself an art. To read Private I is to recognize how art becomes life’s organizing principle, a force that disperses the artist into many forms yet remains indivisibly her own. That is the book’s truest insight: there is only one Lynn Hershman Leeson, and she is many.