Christina Schlesinger: “Freedom Was the Real Revolution”
From Womanhouse to the Guerrilla Girls, the American artist reflects on lesbian visibility, public art, feminism, and the lifelong process of becoming herself.
When I met Christina Schlesinger, she was sitting outside her home in East Hampton, surrounded by the quiet greenery of Long Island. For a moment, Nancy Fried, her longtime partner, sculptor, and artist, joined us. The scene felt peaceful, almost ordinary. Nothing about it suggested that the woman in front of me had lived through some of the defining chapters of postwar American art.
If you’re new to this wider project, start here: Feminism in Art Isn’t a Style: It’s a Battle Over Visibility.
You can also browse the full archive in my Feminism category.
Link to the Italian version on Artribune
Yet Schlesinger’s story passes through Womanhouse, the Feminist Art Program at CalArts, the birth of public art in Los Angeles, the founding of SPARC alongside Judy Baca, lesbian visibility movements, and the Guerrilla Girls.
For many artists, any one of those experiences would define a career. What stayed with me after our conversation was not a single achievement, but a sentence: “It was during those ten years that I built my life.” Leaving home, discovering the early feminist movement, finding community in Venice Beach, painting murals, embracing a lesbian identity: these no longer seemed like separate chapters, but different forms of the same search.
Born into one of America’s most influential intellectual families, Schlesinger grew up surrounded by politicians, writers, academics, and public figures. Her father, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., advised President John F. Kennedy and occupied a central place in American cultural life. From the outside, her future appeared almost predetermined.
Instead, she left.
In the early 1970s, she moved to California to become an artist, live openly as a lesbian, and construct a life on her own terms. That decision would eventually lead her to Womanhouse, public art, feminism, and the Guerrilla Girls.
THE INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTINA
Your story is often associated with feminist art, public art, and the Guerrilla Girls. Yet listening to you, it seems that all of those stories begin with a much simpler act: leaving. What were you really looking for when you left the East Coast for California?
I really think that if I hadn’t had the desire to come out as a lesbian, I probably never would have left the East Coast. I had a comfortable life there, but I just couldn’t be myself. I had a very well-known father, I had a very strong mother, and it was this formidable background.
All I wanted to do was run away as far as I could.
So I went to California. Nobody knew who my father was. Nobody cared where I came from. I spent the next ten years there, and it was during those years that I built my life. I was able to construct a life that I wanted.
You have often spoken about leaving home in order to become yourself. What exactly were you leaving behind?
My father knew everybody. Through him I met movie stars, politicians, writers. He was very close to Kennedy and was considered one of the great historians of the twentieth century.
I loved my parents and I was very close to them, but I didn’t want to disappoint them and at the same time I needed to figure out what I wanted.
I don’t know what ideas they had for me, but they weren’t the ideas that I had.
It was this big struggle to figure out what they wanted and what I wanted.
All I wanted to do was run away as far as I could.
Being far away helped. California gave me the freedom and privacy to build my own life.
When people think about the early feminist movement, they often imagine a clear path through Womanhouse and CalArts. Yet your story seems more complicated. While discovering feminist art, you were also discovering public art through Judy Baca. How did those two worlds shape you?
The thing that really influenced me the most was Womanhouse.
I had just come out to California. I had fled there to come out as a lesbian in the early seventies. I was living in Venice Beach and making art, but when I saw Womanhouse all these lights went on in my head about the kind of art that I could be making and how I responded to it.
It was after seeing Womanhouse that I decided to apply to the Feminist Art Program at CalArts.
That’s where I got to know artists like Arlene Raven, Miriam Schapiro and Faith Wilding.
At the same time I had met Judy Baca in a lesbian bar in Venice Beach.
She said, “Do you want to paint murals?”
And I said, “Yes.”
So there I was, doing feminist art at CalArts and painting murals with Judy. Eventually I had to choose between the two. Public art won. I dropped out, became a mural painter, and later Judy and I co-founded SPARC.
Listening to you, Venice Beach sounds less like a neighborhood and more like a refuge.
It really was. There was more privacy then, more freedom. No social media, no cell phones. You could disappear for a while and build a life. Every crazy person, or gay person, or misfit ended up in Venice Beach. My friends came from Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, from everywhere. They had left places where they felt they didn’t fit in, and somehow they all ended up there.
Looking at your work, one senses a strong feeling of freedom. The Tomboys series still feels remarkably contemporary. Do you think those paintings continue to resonate today?
I think they do. When I made those paintings, the context was very different. We didn’t use the word queer then. In my generation, we talked about being lesbians.
But beyond the language, the paintings are really about people trying to live outside expectations and find their own place in the world. That hasn’t changed.
The Tomboys eventually led to the Dildo Paintings. Looking back, do you see them as part of the same journey?
Yes, absolutely. For me, there is a line that runs from the Birch paintings to the Lesbian Bar series, the Tomboys, and then the Dildo Paintings. It was all part of the same exploration.
When I first showed the Dildo paintings in the early 1990s, people were often shocked by them and it was difficult to exhibit them. Today they seem much less controversial. Like a lot of work by women artists, they needed time before people were ready to see them.
The Dildo Paintings are fascinating because they seem to reverse a long tradition in art history. For centuries, women’s sexuality was represented largely through a male gaze. Your paintings are playful, direct, and unapologetically lesbian. Do you think some of the discomfort they generated came from the fact that they removed men from the picture altogether?
That’s interesting. I hadn’t thought about it exactly that way, but certainly the paintings came from a lesbian perspective and from a desire to represent experiences that were rarely visible in art. At the time, that made many people uncomfortable. Today the reaction is very different.
What surprised me is how much the paintings have changed without changing at all. The paintings are the same. What changed is the culture around them.
Looking across your work, I often have the feeling that your paintings are really portraits in disguise. Even the Birch series feels less about trees than about people.
I think those are very feminist paintings. I saw the birches as women’s bodies. There was a connection between the trees and my own body. I looked at the trees and I saw my body.
I started by painting outdoors, making small plein-air paintings, then I enlarged them in the studio and created relationships and personalities among them.
To me, it was an extension of my feminist thinking.
When you look at younger generations today, do you think they have the same sense of possibility and freedom that shaped your generation?
No. I look at my daughter and I think it’s very difficult to be young now. It feels like there’s a lot less freedom. We thought everything was moving in the right direction. We had a Black president. We thought maybe we would have a woman president.
It felt like progress was inevitable. Then we fell off a cliff. Everything crashed.
You are often introduced as one of the original Guerrilla Girls, where you worked under the name Romaine Brooks. Looking back, that choice seems revealing. Brooks was one of the few artists who embodied both an artistic life and a lesbian life at a time when neither was easily visible. What did she represent to you, and how do you see the relationship today between the activist Romaine Brooks and the painter Christina Schlesinger?
Romaine Brooks was important to me because she was one of the few lesbian artists whose life and work I could look to. There weren’t many visible role models then. She represented a kind of independence and a commitment to living life on her own terms.
In a way, the choice makes sense when I look back at my own work. The Lesbian Bar series, the Tomboys, the Dildo paintings, they all explore identity, sexuality, and freedom in different ways. Being a Guerrilla Girl was my feminist activism. The paintings were another expression of the same beliefs. I never really separated the two.
Recommended Book
Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly
The Guerrilla Girls present hundreds of projects created during their decades-long campaign against sexism, racism, inequality, and exclusion in the art world.
