Christina Schlesinger (born November 19, 1946) is an American painter and muralist. Daughter of historian

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr. (; born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger; October 15, 1917 – February 28, 2007) was an American historian, social critic, and public intellectual. The son of the influential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. and a s ...

, she sought independence from her family's fame, practiced “protest art”, and came out as a lesbian. She made strong rapport with the Chicano community in Venice, California, where she founded the multi-cultural art center

SPARC SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture originally developed by Sun Microsystems. Its design was strongly influenced by the experimental Berkeley RISC system develope ...

Life and career

Schlesinger is the daughter of the famous historian,

and artist

Marian Cannon Schlesinger Marian Cannon Schlesinger (September 13, 1912 – October 14, 2017) was an American artist and author. She published two volumes of her memoir, ''Snatched from Oblivion: A Cambridge Memoir'' and ''I Remember: A Life of Politics, Painting and Peo ...

. Schlesinger grew up in

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston ...

. She had two brothers,Stephen and Andrew, a half-brother, Robert and a sister, Katharine who died in 2004 of ovarian cancer. She was the middle child. Schlesinger's mother was an accomplished artist in her own right. Schlesinger always considered herself a

tomboy A tomboy is a term for a girl or a young woman with masculine qualities. It can include wearing androgynous or unfeminine clothing and actively engage in physical sports or other activities and behaviors usually associated with boys or men. W ...

and recalls that she and her mother argued about her wearing dresses. Instead, she wanted to do things which were considered traditionally male at the time. Schlesinger attended Radcliffe College and was an English and Fine Arts major, graduating '' cum laude'' in 1968. She attended the

Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture is an artists residency located in Madison, Maine, just outside of Skowhegan. Every year, the program accepts online applications from emerging artists from November through January, and selects 65 ...

during the summer of 1968. After Schlesinger finished school, she started to create "protest art." Her mother and father were divorced in 1970. The divorce created a desire in Schlesinger to "get away" and she had her own things to say. In 1971, Schlesinger moved to Los Angeles. Schlesinger came out as a lesbian in

Venice, California Venice is a neighborhood of the city of Los Angeles within the Westside region of Los Angeles County, California. Venice was founded by Abbot Kinney in 1905 as a seaside resort town. It was an independent city until 1926, when it was annexed by ...

and found the

Chicano Chicano or Chicana is a chosen identity for many Mexican Americans in the United States. The label ''Chicano'' is sometimes used interchangeably with ''Mexican American'', although the terms have different meanings. While Mexican-American ident ...

community to be supportive of her. Schlesinger met artist,

Judy Baca Judith Francisca Baca (born September 20, 1946) is an American artist, activist, and professor of Chicano studies, world arts, and cultures based at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the co-founder and artistic director of the Soc ...

, at a lesbian bar, Big Bothers, in Venice where Baca was recruiting artists to paint ''The History of Venice''murals. The two artists then collaborated on that mural. In 1976, she and Baca and filmmaker

Donna Deitch Donna Deitch (born June 8, 1945, San Francisco, California) is an American film and television director, producer, and writer best known for her 1985 film ''Desert Hearts''. The movie was the first feature film to depict a lesbian love story in ...

, co-founded SPARC. Schlesinger was instrumental in coming up with the name of the center. Schlesinger remains proud of her part in SPARC and its commitment to public art that uncovers hidden parts of history and lends a political and social consciousness to art. She was also part of the team of artists who helped design '' The Great Wall of Los Angeles''. Schlesinger moved back to New York in the 1980s, where she quickly started showing her work. In the early 1990s, Schlesinger became part of the Guerrilla Girls. Each artist in the Guerrilla Girls chooses to remain anonymous and go by an artist's name. Schlesinger chose the name

Romaine Brooks Romaine Brooks (born Beatrice Romaine Goddard; May 1, 1874 – December 7, 1970) was an American painter who worked mostly in Paris and Capri. She specialized in portrait painting, portraiture and used a subdued tonal Palette (painting), palette ...

. Schlesinger received an MFA from Rutgers in 1994. Schlesinger was a cultural history and art teacher at the Ross School, where she worked from 1996 until 2005. During this time, she adopted and her partner, sculptor Nancy Fried, adopted their daughter, Chun from China. In 2001, she moved to East Hampton and later built a studio there. In 2008, Schlesinger was diagnosed with

non-Hodgkin lymphoma Non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), also known as non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, is a group of blood cancers that includes all types of lymphomas except Hodgkin lymphomas. Symptoms include enlarged lymph nodes, fever, night sweats, weight loss, and tirednes ...

. The treatment and complications from the cancer kept her from painting for two years. After her recovery, Schlesinger continued to work, teach and show her art in different venues.

Art

In the 1990s Schlesinger created "explicitly erotic work." During the 1990s, it was very taboo for lesbians to bring up issues of sexualty, and many felt as if they were "forced into hiding." Schlesinger boldly depicted lesbians (including portraits of herself) wearing dildos and penetrating other women. Schlesinger was interested in "representing female masculinity" and "refuting the notion that the artist's erotic gaze is exclusively male." Her work was also very much about embracing and celebrating her sexuality. These paintings and etchings of a very erotic nature were considered gutsy and ground-breaking, and many of them were not shown again until 2014. ''Chagall Comes to Venice Beach'' (1991) is a large mural, 138 by 18 feet long, painted on the Israel Levin Senior Adult Center in

. The mural celebrates the

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

community of

Los Angeles Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, largest city in the U.S. state, state of California and the List of United States cities by population, sec ...

. In 1994, the mural was destroyed in the

Northridge earthquake The 1994 Northridge earthquake was a moment 6.7 (), blind thrust earthquake that occurred on January 17, 1994, at 4:30:55 a.m. PST in the San Fernando Valley region of the City of Los Angeles. The quake had a duration of approximatel ...

.. Schlesinger returned to Los Angeles in 1996 to repaint the mural now called ''Chagall Returns to Venice Beach''. In 2016, the mural was land marked by the city of Los Angeles. In 2018 the building was renovated and the mural was destroyed a second time. In 2021, the Jewish Federation re-commissioned Schlesinger to paint a 15 by 9 foot interior mural, printed on metal and visible to the public from the boardwalk through a bank of windows. Schlesinger's landscapes paintings include her birch trees series which use images of nature as a stand-in for love and eroticism. ''The Long Good-Bye'' depicts two trees in the moonlight. Schlesinger's current work embraces her love of mural painting and nature. It consists of large scale ink paintings of trees and waterfalls on bed sheets, influenced by both the scale of mural painting as well as earlier brush painting techniques she learned in China. Some of her artistic influences include

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Comte Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa (24 November 1864 – 9 September 1901) was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, caricaturist and illustrator whose immersion in the colourful and theatrical life of Paris in th ...

, Giotto, photographer BrassaÏ,

Miriam Schapiro Miriam Schapiro (also known as Mimi) (November 15, 1923 – June 20, 2015) was a Canadian-born artist based in the United States. She was a painter, sculptor, printmaker, and a pioneer of feminist art. She was also considered a leader of the Pa ...

, and

Sigmar Polke Sigmar Polke (13 February 1941 – 10 June 2010) was a German painter and photographer. Polke experimented with a wide range of styles, subject matters and materials. In the 1970s, he concentrated on photography, returning to paint in the 1980s ...

Quotes

"The tomboy is the lesbian's inner core, her secret weapon."

References

External links

Christina Schlesinger Official Site

Christina Schlesinger
(video) {{DEFAULTSORT:Schlesinger, Christina 1946 births Living people 20th-century American painters 21st-century American painters 20th-century American women artists 21st-century American women artists American muralists American people of Austrian descent American people of English descent American people of German-Jewish descent American women painters Artists from Cambridge, Massachusetts Lesbian artists American LGBT artists Painters from Massachusetts Radcliffe College alumni Women muralists 21st-century LGBT people