Portrait of an Artist As a Young Woman

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 overthrow? And what did it take for a woman to insist on being not someone’s muse, girlfriend, comrade, or supporting character, but an artist and political actor in her own right? Moving between fiction and lived history, from the New York art world and the emergence of women filmmakers to the Black Panthers and Oakland, their conversation asks what happens when women tell the story of a supposedly liberated generation for themselves.

Alexis Krasilovsky is an award-winning filmmaker, author, and Professor Emerita of Cinema and Television Arts at California State University, Northridge. A member of Yale’s first coeducational graduating class, she made End of the Art World, featuring Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and other major artists. Her decades-long work on women and filmmaking includes the documentary Women Behind the Camera and the books Women Behind the Camera: Conversations with Camerawomen and Shooting Women: Behind the Camera, Around the World. Her new novel, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman, will be published by City Point Press in September 2026.

Judy Juanita is an award-winning poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist whose work spans race, gender, radical politics, and California life. Her semi-autobiographical novel Virgin Soul follows a young Black woman drawn into the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s. Her recent books include the memoir California Fever Dream and Abortion (or Woman as Threefold Murderess). Her poetry collection Manhattan my ass, you’re in Oakland won the 2021 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and her essay collection DeFacto Feminism: Essays Straight Outta Oakland examines race, gender, politics, and spirituality through the perspective of a Black activist and self-described “feminist foot soldier.”