Documentary 'Women Art Revolution' chronicles the genesis of the Feminist Art Movement

The documentary makes the point that the average person can't identify more than one female visual artist, and that this is because women artists have been marginalized.

But really... can anyone name more than one male visual artist? Any average person? They might know Van Gogh, because he cut off his ear, and they might know Picasso because his stuff looks stupid...but who else will they know?

OLA.com: Documentary 'Women Art Revolution' chronicles the genesis of the Feminist Art Movement
Ignoring the pretension of the inverted exclamation point in the title, the documentary "¡Women Art Revolution" has a point to make, and it wastes no time in making it.

It happens within the first two minutes, as director Lynn Hershman-Leeson polls people outside New York's Whitney Museum of American Art. The question: Can you name three female visual artists?

There's Frida Kahlo, of course, and then ... then ...

Point made. There are thousands more, of course, but the art establishment has for so long marginalized them, ignored them and condescended to them that few outside the art community have anything more than a casual knowledge of most of them.

"¡Women Art Revolution" -- opening today for a weeklong run at the Zeitgeist Multi-Disciplinary Arts Center -- is their story, built around hundreds of hours of interviews Hershman-Leeson conducted with artists, critics and curators over decades of involvement in the feminist art movement. It's a movement with origins in the civil rights struggle of the late 1960s, but which really blossomed in the 1970s, and its story is a compelling one, with its cast of strong, driven, fascinating women.

Hershman-Leeson's film does a nice job of recounting the movement's origins -- there's an exhaustive amount of information here, and it's just a drop in the bucket of what the filmmaker has made available online -- but one only wishes she would have focused less on talking heads and more on the art at the center of it all. There are one or two exceptions (Judy Chicago's "Dinner Party" installation springs to mind), but, for the most part, she tries to squeeze in images of so many works that few get a chance to stand out.

Still, whether you're empowered by it or threatened by it, it's difficult to take issue with the importance of the feminist art movement. These women deserve to have their voices heard, and this film finally lets them have their say.