Over the last five decades, Lynn Hershman Leeson has made innovative work investigating the relationship between humans and technology, identity, surveillance, and media as a tool of empowerment against censorship and political repression. A conversation between the artist and Scott Rothkopf, the Whitney’s Alice Pratt Brown Director, follows the presentation.
For this Walter Annenberg Lecture, Hershman Leeson will present a talk about her practice from the 1960s to the present. A chronic heart condition shaped her drawings of female cyborg figures, which were first exhibited in the 1966 exhibition Adventure of a Line: Drawing Experiences by Lynn Lester Hershman at Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Her drawings replace organs with machine parts and feature stamped words and other artifacts, representing proposals for a new kind of body. Her “breathing machines,” mechanical visages molded from her own face that inflate with the illusion of life and sometimes speak through recorded sound, are testaments of the roles medicine and health play in her work. She seeks a way to combine her previous explorations of the cyborg, and her increasing awareness of the sociopolitical turmoil around her, resulting in a series of sculptures representing humans’ dependency on technology to both breathe and speak. Hershman Leeson’s intersection of art and technology has led to the creation of many ground-breaking works within media as a tool of representation and empowerment against authoritative political forces.
“Throughout her decades-long career, Hershman Leeson has shown an uncanny ability to meld personal reflections and technological explorations across mediums,” said Laura Phipps, Associate Curator at the Whitney and co-curator of current exhibition Sixties Surreal. “She has introduced a new vocabulary around sculpture, the human form, and possibilities for the future that invigorates and challenges artists today.”
“The Annenberg Lecture is an opportunity for our audiences to engage directly with living artists who are defining, challenging, and expanding culture,” said Scott Rothkopf, the Museum’s Alice Pratt Brown Director and co-curator of Sixties Surreal. “Leeson’s work is a treasured part of our collection and we are thrilled to have her back on view in our galleries and onstage.” “Just as organic printing and DNA manipulation reshapes identities of newly manipulated organisms, so too the culture of surveillance has dynamically shifted how and what we see,” said artist Lynn Hershman Leeson.
(from the press release)
Lynn Hershman. Conferenza Walter Annenberg, 05.11.2025, 6.30p.m. (New York time), Whitney Museum of American Art, Susan and John Hess Family Theater, online via Zoom (you can register for the webinar here)
This annual lecture is given in honor of the late Walter H. Annenberg, philanthropist, patron of the arts, and former ambassador. Past Annenberg Lecture participants include Christine Sun Kim (2025), Nancy Baker Cahill (2024), Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (2023), Dawoud Bey (2021), Julie Mehretu (2020, presented spring 2021), Jason Moran (2019), Kara Walker (2018), Catherine Opie (2017), Martha Rosler (2016), and Frank Stella (2015).
Lynn Hershman Leeson (b. 1941) lives and works in San Francisco, CA. Over the last five decades, Hershman Leeson has been internationally acclaimed for her art and films. One of the most influential media artists, she is widely recognized for her innovative work investigating issues that are now recognized as key to the workings of society: the relationship between humans and technology, identity, surveillance, and the use of media as a tool of empowerment against censorship and political repression. Over the last forty years she has made pioneering contributions to the fields of photography, video, film, performance, installation and interactive as well as net-based media art.
Sixties Surreal is an ambitious, scholarly revisionist look at American art from 1958 to 1972 through the lens of the “surreal,” both inherited and reinvented. The exhibition features the work of 111 artists who embraced the psychosexual, fantastical, and revolutionary energy of an era shaped by civil unrest, cultural upheaval, and boundless experimentation.
Rather than adhering to familiar movements of the 1960s like Pop Art, Conceptualism, or Minimalism, Sixties Surreal uncovers alternate histories and recontextualizes some of the decade’s best-known figures alongside those only recently rediscovered. The exhibition considers how artists turned to Surrealism, not as a European import, but as a way to navigate the strange, turbulent realities of American life. Featuring iconic works by Diane Arbus, Yayoi Kusama, Romare Bearden, Judy Chicago, Nancy Grossman, Christina Ramberg, David Hammons, Louise Bourgeois, Jasper Johns, Fritz Scholder, Peter Saul, Marisol, Robert Crumb, Faith Ringgold, H.C. Westermann, Jack Whitten, and many others, the exhibition brings new visibility to a generation of artists who challenged mainstream narratives in pursuit of radical freedom. Spanning painting, sculpture, photography, film, and assemblage, twenty percent of the works on view in Sixties Surreal are drawn from the Whitney’s collection. The exhibition traces how artists working in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and New York grappled with identity, sexuality, race, and power in ways often overlooked in canonical art histories. Influenced by, and taking permission from, the ethos of historical Surrealism—dream logic, eroticism, irrationality—these artists channeled that spirit into new and localized forms, producing work that is deeply personal and politically pointed. From the experimental films of Jordan Belson to the biomorphic sculptures of Barbara Chase-Riboud and the visionary imagery of Jay DeFeo, the show unites diverse voices under a shared impulse to depict the world as it felt at the time, and still today—surreal. Sixties Surreal is organized by Dan Nadel, Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints; Laura Phipps, Associate Curator; Scott Rothkopf, Alice Pratt Brown Director; and Elisabeth Sussman, Curator; with Kelly Long, Senior Curatorial Assistant, and Rowan Diaz-Toth, Curatorial Project Assistant, at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
