In Private I: A Memoir, Leeson does not set out to rewrite her own life but rather to annotate a collective history—of California conceptual art of the 1960s through the early aughts—with proof of female participation. The book serves as validation of Leeson’s body of work—and the numerous contributions she made to projects of male artists that went uncredited—as well as the enduring careers of her colleagues, including Eleanor Coppola and Carolee Schneemann. Private I is a diary, an addendum, a manifesto—but perhaps most of all, the memoir is another art piece by Leeson, a hyper-generative artist who has long mainlined her lived experience into her work. From the start, Leeson, now 84, tells the reader that she’s searching: “What is the MacGuffin of my life? I am writing this memoir to find out.”
New York Theater