Daughter of historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., she sought independence from her family's fame, practiced “protest art”, and came out as a lesbian.
She made a strong rapport with the Chicano community in Venice, California, where she founded the multi-cultural art center SPARC.
[3] She had two brothers, Stephen and Andrew, a half-brother, Robert and a sister, Katharine who died in 2004 of ovarian cancer.
[5] Schlesinger attended Radcliffe College[6] and was an English and Fine Arts major, graduating cum laude in 1968.
[15] She was also part of the team of artists who helped design The Great Wall of Los Angeles.
"[18] Schlesinger boldly depicted lesbians (including portraits of herself) wearing dildos and penetrating other women.
[18] Schlesinger was interested in "representing female masculinity" and "refuting the notion that the artist's erotic gaze is exclusively male.
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 landscape paintings include her birch trees series which use images of nature as a stand-in for love and eroticism.
[23] Some of her artistic influences include Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Giotto, photographer BrassaÏ, Miriam Schapiro, and Sigmar Polke.