decade

1940s

1941

Lynn Hershman Leeson is born in Cleveland.

decade

1960s

1963

Lynn Hershman Leeson earns her BS in museum administration and art at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

1963

Lynn Hershman Leeson moves to the Bay Area to study painting at the University of California, Berkeley, but drops out before the semester even begins.

1965

Feingarten Galleries in Los Angeles organizes Lynn Hershman Leeson’s first solo exhibition.

decade

1970s

1972

A year after Al Ruppersberg’s Al’s Grand Hotel takes place, Lynn Hershman Leeson and Eleanor Coppola decide to transform two rooms in the Dante Hotel, a transient hotel in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. On Halloween 1973, Hershman Leeson places two life-size wax cast figures, one black and one white, under rumpled bed sheets, surrounded by her belongings. For nine months, visitors in the know are allowed to sign in at the front desk and view the installation for free. The installation ends when someone visits the room at 3 am, mistakes the wax figures for corpses, and calls the police, who collect all the objects and take them back to the station.

1972

Lynn Hershman Leeson earns her MA in art criticism from San Francisco State University.

1974–78 1974

Lynn Hershman Leeson operates The Floating Museum, a project that commissions, organizes, and exhibits site-specific, public art in unconventional spaces. The project begins in the San Francisco Bay Area and eventually occurs across the globe.

mid-1970s 1975

Lynn Hershman Leeson invites Judith Barry’s Motion to be a part of an art fair in Bologna with Arturo Schwarz.

1977

Judith Barry contributes an outdoor sound installation as part of Lynn Hershman Leeson’s 1977 Floating Museum project (H)errata.

1978

Lynn Hershman Leeson invites Motion to be a part of her Global Space Phase Invasion II project through the Floating Museum at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, out of which comes Judith Barry’s Kaleidoscope performance and subsequent video.

decade

1980s

1984

Terry Allen composes the music for Lynn Hershman Leeson’s interactive video work Lorna.

1984

Terry Allen composes music for Lynn Hershman Leeson’s work Lorna.

decade

1990s

1993–2004 1993

Lynn Hershman Leeson is a professor of electronic arts at the University of California, Davis.

decade

2000s

2006

Lynn Hershman Leeson interviews Mike Kelley for !Women Art Revolution.

2007

Lynn Hershman Leeson becomes chair of the Film Department at the San Francisco Art Institute.

2007

Judy Chicago, Mary Kelly, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Senga Nengudi, Miriam Schapiro, and June Wayne are included in the traveling exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

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