Portrait of an Artist As a Young Woman

The revolution had a sex life.

About this Event

The late 1960s told young women to get free—sexually, politically, artistically. And for many, those freedoms were exhilarating. But liberation could also create contradictions of its own. In Alexis Krasilovsky’s new novel, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman, an aspiring filmmaker plunges into the art and sexual experimentation of the era, navigating desire, ambition, creative possibility, exploitation, and old hierarchies in new clothes. Judy Juanita’s Virgin Soul, meanwhile, follows a young Black woman drawn into the revolutionary politics of the Black Panther Party, where idealism, danger, race, sex, and power collide.

Krasilovsky and Juanita—whose own lives intersect with the histories their novels revisit—come together at Clio’s to interrogate the mythology of liberation from the inside. What did “free love” offer women, and what did it demand of them? Could radical movements escape the inequalities of the society they wanted to ove