Episodes
-
Welcome to the FINALE of Season 12! I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the acclaimed writer, Sheila Heti.
Born in 1976 in Toronto, where she lives today, Heti is the author of eleven books, from novels to novellas, short stories and children’s books. Most recently, her acclaimed books have included Alphabetical Diaries, that ordered a decade worth of diaries in alphabetical order; Pure Colour (2022), a novel that explores grief, art and time; Motherhood (2018), a meditation on whether or not to become a mother in a society that judges you whatever the outcome. Heti’s writing is some of the most honest, thoughtful I’ve ever read, and throughout weaves in the broad subject of art, whether it be paintings or her protagonists’ professions…
Heti also wrote for the literary journal the Believer, and has conducted many long-form print interviews with writers and artists, including conversations with Joan Didion, Elena Ferrante, Agnes Varda, Sophie Calle, who are among some of the artists we are going to be, very excitingly, discussing today.
--
THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:
https://www.famm.com/en/
https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037
Follow us:
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic
Music by Ben Wetherfield -
I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast today is the renowned British artist, Barbara Walker.
Born in Birmingham, where she lives and works today, Walker is hailed for her intimate paintings of everyday life, and intricate drawings that not only show power dynamics in Old Master Paintings, but give voice to histories that are all too often erased.
From works on paper to paintings on canvas, and large-scale charcoal wall drawings, Walker’s work, no matter their scale, is full of empathy, depth, and emotion. Some tell us stories about the state of affairs in Britain, whereas others are much more personal – in the early 2000s, she made her son the subject of her work – which get to the heart of the brokenness in our society, and look at situations from both an artistic and motherly gaze.
Research is at the heart of Walker’s work, and she frequently goes into public archives, such as for her incredible series, Shock and Awe, which highlighted the contribution of Caribbean servicemen and women serving in the British Army from 1914 to the present day. As well as “Vanishing Point”, which so movingly – and powerfully – explores the visibility and invisibility of Black subjects in Western European collections in our museum collections.
Drawing in the Black figures while obscuring the dominant white subjects, Walker encourages the viewer to consider other perspectives beyond the ones that have become the so-called ‘default’ in these institutions.
But she is also interested in the unknown – as she says: As she says, “I'll go into archives looking for the backstories behind events, individuals or paintings, but I never know what I'm going to find. Making art is about curiosity and it's the same in the archive – I love playing in the unknown.”
Very excitingly, a major survey of her work is currently on view at the Whitworth Museum in Manchester, in including her Turner Prize nominated group of portraits, Burden of Proof, a poignant response to the Windrush Scandal – and a newly commissioned printed wallpaper inspired by the Whitworth’s collection, that continues her representation of the Windrush generation.
--
THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:
https://www.famm.com/en/
https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037
Follow us:
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic
Music by Ben Wetherfield -
Episodes manquant?
-
I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is one of the world’s most renowned artists, Shahzia Sikander.
Working across painting, sculpture, drawing, and animation, the Lahore-born, New York-based Sikander is widely celebrated for her work that subverts tradition and reclaims narratives – such as her subverting of Central and South-Asian manuscript painting and launching the form known today as neo-miniature.
A holder of a B.F.A. in 1991 from the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore, it was Sikander’s breakthrough work, The Scroll, 1989–90, that received national critical acclaim in Pakistan and brought international recognition to the medium in contemporary art practices in the 1990s.
Life then took her to the US, where she received, in 1995, her M.F.A. at the Rhode Island School of Design. Over the subsequent twenty plus years, Sikander’s practice – which has expanded into multiple mediums – has been pivotal in showcasing art of the South Asian diaspora as a contemporary American tradition.
Solo exhibitions include at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in Texas; the Morgan Library and Museum in New York; accolades include the Pollock Prize for Creativity, a medal of Art by the U.S. Department of State, and a MacArthur Fellowship; she is in the collections of all major national and international museums, and she is currently an adjunct professor for Fall of 2024 at Columbia University,
Sikander's major outdoor project, NOW, an 8-foot bronze female sculpture, is permanently installed on the roof of the Appellate Courthouse in Manhattan. An accompanying 18-foot female sculpture, Witness, was exhibited in Madison Square Park in 2023, which then travelled to Houston – something we will get into later on in this episode.
Her interdisciplinary practice, that has focussed on hybridised female figures that references goddesses from all different global perspectives, offers a perspective that breaks down all borders, disrupts assumptions around art historical boundaries. It is groundbreaking, trailblazing – and I can’t wait to find out more.
--
THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:
https://www.famm.com/en/
https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037
Follow us:
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic
Music by Ben Wetherfield -
I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the renowned German painter, Katharina Grosse.
Hailed for her site-specific paintings which she spray-paints onto rocks, walls, landscapes and architecture, Grosse’s works explode with luminous colour. Working both indoor and outdoor, she upends all traditions when it comes to painting: dissolving framing devices, vantage points, or a clear indication of where a work begins and ends. Witness one of her all-engulfing work in person, and your perspective constantly shifts: from afar they feel like giant swathes of colour, but up close, details of the paint reveal themselves.
Grosse is architect, sculptor and painter all at once. In her words, she aims to ‘reset’ what painting is and can be. But while she employs the artforms in the most imaginative and inventive ways, she also gets us to think about their histories and traditions – for example, how we could compare her work to an all-encompassing painted renaissance chapel in Florence, something that became apparent to her on a year abroad to Italy in her youth.
Fascinated by colour and light since childhood, Grosse was raised at a pivotal moment in German history. Born in 1961 in Freiberg, West Germany, but often visited family in East Germany, she grew p in a post-Second World War society – when artists were grappling with the identity of German art.
As a teen she studied in Cambridge in the UK, before completing her studies at the University of Fine Arts Müster and Fine Arts Dusseldorf. She then went to live in Marseille and Florence, where she was an artist in residence at the Villa Romana…
Today, she lives and works in Berlin, and has gone onto have some of the most important, mind-expanding exhibitions of the 21st century – from a installation at the Venice Biennale in 2015, to transforming the Historic Hall of Hamburger Bahnhof; her Colossal takeover at Sydney’s Carriageworks and, for MoMA PS1, spray painting reds and whites on a former military site in the Rockaways.
Today we meet her at her current exhibition at Gagosian in New York – titled Pie Sell, Lee Slip, Eel Lips – where she is exhibiting an extraordinary collection of works that she calls Studio Paintings – and I can’t wait to find out more.
--
THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:
https://www.famm.com/en/
https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037
Follow us:
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic
Music by Ben Wetherfield -
I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is one of the most trailblazing artists and poets in the world right now, Cecilia Vicuna.
Born in 1948 in Chile, and based between Santiago and New York, Vicuna is hailed for her works that are as ephemeral as they are permanent, colossal as they are minute, fragile as they are strong, that bring together sound, weaving, language, and community.
Educated in Santiago in the 1960s, life took Vicuna to London to study at the Slade School of Art on a scholarship in the 1970s, but because of the Pinochet regime that began in 1973, she was forced to live in exile. Soon she went to Bogota, Colombia, before moving to New York City, where she has remained ever since, in the same loft and tending to the same community garden.
Since Vicuna was a teen, she has focussed on a political orientation for her art, as she has said, because she “understood that the life of this planet was endangered”. Through artforms she calls “arte precario” – precarious art – because it disappears and is vulnerable, Vicuna has held up a poignant mirror to our world through her installations that meld twigs, bamboo, stones, and shredded textiles. While they show us its beauty, they also convey its vulnerability: warning us about what will happen if we don’t wake up in time to protect our ecosystems…
At the heart of her art is language – specifically the quipu, which means knots in Quecha, a system of encoding information from the Andes – that conveys as much information as the alphabet – which was used for 5000 years, before being wiped out during colonisation…
As well as the importance of togetherness. Because, in a world as destructive as ours we need more than ever to unite, to rebuild the planet for our future descendents, as she says, “not only for the survival of our species, but because it is joyful, fun, beautiful and delightful.”
This November, I am excited to say that a new exhibition of Vicuna’s work will open at Lehmann Maupin Gallery in NYC, featuring paintings that she has re-rendered from the 1970s, while on a trip to Bogota and Rio. Dazzling in hues of pinks and yellows, they explore the Yoruba Mythology that represents human or divine characteristics and concepts of nature, and I can’t wait to find out more.
https://www.lehmannmaupin.com/exhibitions
––
THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:
https://www.famm.com/en/
https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037
Follow us:
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Lauren Armstrong Carter
Music by Ben Wetherfield -
I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is Maria Balshaw.
Currently serving as Director of Tate, a position she has held since 2017, Balshaw began her career as an academic and lecturer in cultural studies. At the dawn of the 2000s, she swapped this to become Director of Creative Partnerships, a government programme that aimed to develop creativity in young people by bringing schools and artists together, which was sadly cut after the Labour Government was replaced by the coalition.
In 2006, she became the director of the Whitworth Art Gallery, and in 2011, took on the additional role of director of Manchester City Galleries, and, to cement her reign in Manchester, she was made Director of culture, while also earning herself a CBE.
But it’s been under her premiership at Tate – as the historic institution’s first ever female director – where we’ve seen some of the most groundbreaking shows take place in recent years. From Women in Revolt, that explored the trailblazing work of feminist communities in Britain; Now You See Us: Women Artists 1520–1920, that essentially rewrote art history from a female perspective – and even introduced me to hundreds of names I hadn’t heard of; or Life Between Islands: Caribbean British Art from the 1950s to today.
There’s been solo shows of Yoko Ono, Paula Rego, Zanele Muholi, Sarah Lucas, Cornelia Parker, and so much more – and… I’m sure more to come.
Tate today is fizzing with great shows, an institution no doubt unrecognisable to when Balshaw first visited aged 16 when she came down to London on the train from her hometown, Northampton in search of modern art. Though she found the dizzying world of Bridget Riley, it was mainly the Picassos on the wall. And while that’s still good art, representation of different communities, cultures, genders and classes, is important.
And there is no denying that having people in charge who are invested in the importance of this, has a huge impact on how art history has been and is being written – which Balshaw is at the centre of shaping. And, I am excited to say, she has just published a book, Gathering of Strangers, about museums: their origins, roles, and complexities, and the future of what they mean today.
Here is a link to her new book! https://www.waterstones.com/book/gathering-of-strangers/maria-balshaw/9781849769136
--
THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:
https://www.famm.com/en/
https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037
Follow us:
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic
Music by Ben Wetherfield -
Remembering the great Audrey Flack (1931–2024). Earlier this year, I interviewed Flack over a series of interviews before she passed away on 28 June 2024. Audrey was a force, and I hope you enjoy listening to her powerful and moving words.
If you want to learn more, I highly recommend her memoir: With Darkness Came Stars: A Memoir (https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09674-2.html)
--
I couldn’t be more excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the esteemed American artist, sculptor, photo-realist painter, and native New Yorker, Audrey Flack.
Hailed for her sculptures of divine goddesses and Biblical characters; her paintings evocative of Old Masters that explore the historic subjects but with pop imagery; and abstract canvases, made in the 1940s and 50s, filled with swathes of movement, colour, and vigour – Audrey Flack, has been at the forefront of the art world.
Brought up in New York City, Flack studied at Cooper Union and then Yale, where she was one of the only women and was taught under Josef Albers – in the early 1950s Flack found herself amongst the burgeoning downtown art scene, where she frequented the Abstract Expressionist haunt, the Cedar Bar, and hung out with her friends who included Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan. Audrey Flack knew them all.
At the onset of Pop, she turned to photorealist painting, capturing in it distinctively feminist subjects, such as traditional objects associated with femininity and beauty, and then it was to sculpting female archetypes, taking back ancient-old stories steeped in misogynism, and reworking them for a 20th and 21st century audience.
Whilst she paints and sculpts – and is in the collections of museums such as the Met and MoMA, – Audrey also takes the role of lead vocals and banjo with her band “Audrey Flack and the History of Art Band”, where she centres her songs around female injustice, the most recent being about the French sculptor, Camille Claudel.
At 93 years old, you can often find her wearing t-shirts emblazoned with slogans such as Feminist AF, posing in front of her large-scale works, and wearing sunglasses inside.
Flack has written it all down in a memoir – With Darkness Came Stars, one of the most moving, extraordinary books I’ve ever read. Not just for her artistic insights and incredible first-hand analogies of those who she knew in the 20th Century New York artworld, but, for writing, in such genuine words, the truth of what it’s like being a mother, a mother and an artist, and a mother to an autistic child. I was moved to tears a number of times. It made me realise, so acutely, how women and mothers have been treated with such injustice, yet had so much resilience to fight for their voice, their art, their children, and their path. I couldn’t recommend it highly enough.
--
THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:
https://www.famm.com/en/
https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037
Follow us:
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic
Music by Ben Wetherfield -
This is a (Halloween special!) bonus episode that explores the image of Witches in Art, as told by Professor Lyndal Roper!
What is a witch? Where does it stem from? Why is she so often an old woman, who is harmful and evil? How did this perpetuate the way women were treated in history? What is a witch today?
Roper, a regius professor of History at the University Oxford, is one of the global experts on the history of witchcraft.
She is the author of:
Witch Craze, that examines in-depth the trials of women accused of witchcraft, and argued that the craze sprang from a collective fantasy, of which many were older, infertile women who were accused of harming infants and destroying fertility in the natural and human world: https://yalebooks.co.uk/book/9780300119831/
The Witch in the Western Imagination, which looks at the many different visualisations of witches, which in Germany found its “fullest exploration” thanks to the invention in the late 15th century, which in a way, changed the distribution of art forever: https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/4260/
And many more!
--
THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:
https://www.famm.com/en/
https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037
Follow us:
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic
Music by Ben Wetherfield -
I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the writer, critic, and author, Merve Emre.Currently the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University – and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism – Emre is also the acclaimed and award-winning author of numerous books. These include Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America; The Personality Brokers (selected as one of the best books of 2018 by the New York Times, and others); The Ferrante Letters (winner of the 2021 PROSE award for literature). A holder of prizes in Literary Criticism, Emre is also a contributing writer to The New Yorker, where she has written extensively on art and literature, from Leonora Carrington to Susan Sontag. But! The reason why we are speaking to Emre today is because she is also an ardent expert on Virginia Woolf and the wider Bloomsbury Group, having authored the stunningly beautiful – and informative – The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway, a book that brings alive Woolf’s life and words, and contextualises the radical and pioneering lives of those in the Bloomsbury Group in the most effervescent ways. So today on the podcast, we are going to be discussing the sisters at the centre of this movement: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, women who were born into a Victorian society in London but who broke free of all traditions, who formed languages, both artistic and literary, that paved the way of modernism and modernist thinking in the UK and beyond. We are going to be delving into their life and work: looking at how they informed each other and visualised or put into words the world from their distinct and radical perspectives.Merve's book: https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-annotated-mrs-dalloway/merve-emre/virginia-woolf/9781631496769Charleston Trust: https://www.charleston.org.uk/?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjw99e4BhDiARIsAISE7P857bJ_t36EZCN2JGBsJDUlVSxga42Bmq66SzIuCslkje6DXQsi94AaAmYZEALw_wcBMrs Dalloway's Party: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/oct/05/discovered-a-lost-possible-inspiration-for-virginia-woolfs-mrs-dalloway--THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:https://www.famm.com/en/https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037Follow us:Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hesselSound editing by Nada SmiljanicMusic by Ben Wetherfield
-
I am so excited to say that my guest on today’s podcast is the esteemed curator and writer, Emerson Bowyer.
Currently the Searle Curator, Painting and Sculpture of Europe, at the Art Institute of Chicago, Emerson is a specialist in 18th- and 19th-century French and British art. He has worked at New York’s Frick Collection, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where his highly-acclaimed curated exhibitions have spanned the spectrum of sculpture, such as 19th century artist Canova to, more recently, the artist we are very excitingly discussing today, the trailblazing, Camille Claudel.
…which was staged at the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Getty in LA, as the first major exhibition dedicated to the artist in the US for 35 years.
https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/claudel/index.html
https://www.artic.edu/exhibitions/9714/camille-claudel
Born in France in 1864, Claudel has been hailed for her meticulously rendered and intensely passionate works of mythological and real figures. Hand-carving marble, she defied not just her gender, but the possibilities of sculpture itself – with her intimate and skillful portrayals of human bodies and reworkings of classical tales from a distinctly female perspective. Yet, despite having one of the most extraordinary careers in art history, it took until four decades until after her death, in the 1980s for her work to be properly appreciated, and until now – thanks to people like Emerson – who put her work on the world’s stage for all to see. And I cannot wait to find out more!
For extra reading, please check out Rachel Corbett's fantastic book, You Must Change Your Life: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/you-must-change-your-life-rachel-corbett/1123447512?ean=9780393354928
--
THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:
https://www.famm.com/en/
https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037
Follow us:
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic
Music by Ben Wetherfield -
I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is one of the most groundbreaking and era-defining artists around today, Nadya Tolokonnikova.
A founding member of Pussy Riot, the feminist art-collective and performance group, active since 2011, Nadya is an artist, activist, and musician, who has dedicated her life to fighting for freedom, confronting the dangers of the far-right and Putin with his distorted power.
Born in 1989 in the industrial city of Norilsk, Russia, Nadya moved to Moscow aged 17, where she studied philosophy. “Since childhood” as she has said, “I’ve loved finding myself in extreme situations. I’ve always lacked unusual things in my life”. In Moscow, she immediately got involved with the radical activist-art collective, Voina – which translates to ‘war’ in Russian – who hit back at far-right Russian politicians with their mocking commentary performances.
And from 2011, she joined Pussy Riot, with whom she performs highly outspoken and daring guerrilla gigs in public in opposition to President Putin. Global fame for Pussy Riot came in 2012, after their protest-performance in a Moscow church entitled “Punk Prayer: Mother of God Drive Putin Away”, which calls for the Virgin Mary to help them get rid of Putin.
Following this, Nadya was imprisoned, where she was separated from her daughter and experienced horrific conditions. But since her release, she has continued to fight through art, in and outside of Russia, such as her attacks on President Trump and the controlling of women’s bodies. Her recent film, Putin’s Ashes saw her and 11 members of Pussy Riot burn – in a ritual – a picture of Putin, which she then transformed into artworks.
I am in awe of Nadya, her spirit, her ability to fight on a global scale, and her constant openness to sharing her courage – after all, she has stated that any one of us can join the Pussy Riot movement, through her belief that the power of collective action can overcome all.
--
--
THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:
https://www.famm.com/en/
https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037
Follow us:
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic
Music by Ben Wetherfield -
I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is Sophia Jansson – niece of Tove Jansson, the legendary Swedish-speaking Finnish writer, artist, novelist, illustrator, and children’s book author, best known for creating the Moomins.
Born in Helsinki in 1914, Tove grew up immersed in art from a young age. It was thanks to her artist parents, who raised her and her brothers in a home filled with plaster dust, clay, paintings, and floor-to-ceiling books – known to be (quote) “a box with endless secret compartments…” It was even thought she slept on the shelf at one point!
But, growing up in the 1910s and 30s, it was also a time wracked by war. Turning to art, Tove made paintings – in a style influenced by the post-Impressionists – and conceived of imaginary worlds, steeped in nature – from forests to the sea – perhaps to escape the imploding world around her.
Jansson’s books for children and her novels for adults are just as much great stories as they are philosophies on life as she wrote: “before the war I used to think the purpose of life was to act as justly as possible; after the war I thought the purpose of life was to be as happy as possible.”
And there is no shadow of a doubt that Jansson and the Moomins, the large-snouted trolls, can show us the true meanings of life.
ENJOY!
--
THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:
https://www.famm.com/en/
https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037
Follow us:
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic
Music by Ben Wetherfield -
To celebrate the paperback release of The Story of Art Without Men, Katy Hessel reads an excerpt of her chapter on ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM.
Out this Thursday! Get your copy now:
BOOK: https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-story-of-art-without-men/katy-hessel/9781529156096
AUDIO BOOK: https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/The-Story-of-Art-Without-Men-Audiobook/B09P1RK3GV -
I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the author, poet, scholar, and scientific researcher Cat Bohannon.
Now, while this episode is not going to be centred totally on art, it is going to be looking closely at women’s bodies – and what might have contributed to the lack of knowledge about women in wider history. Because Cat Bohannon is renowned for her acclaimed book “Eve” that revolutionises our understanding of the female human body, and how a focus on male subjects in science has left women “under-studied and under-cared for”.
Spanning from the Jurassic period to the present day, Eve hones in on the impact of what females’ exclusion from scientific research has done for our bodies (and world). Through chapters headed under womb, foot, brain, or milk, it recasts the traditional story of evolutionary biology, by placing women at the centre. Because, as she argues, it’s not just a case of sexism – that we don’t know enough about the female body – it’s because the data actually isn’t there.
For example, general anaesthetics weren’t tested on women until 1999. I’m interested in getting to the root of these issues, as well as speaking about how art might correspond to this.
Because as well as being a holder of a PhD from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition, Bohannon has published widely, including essays and poems for Science Magazine and the Georgia Review. And I can’t wait to find out more.
--
Cat's book: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/446844/eve-by-bohannon-cat/9781529156171
https://www.waterstones.com/book/eve/cat-bohannon/9781529151237
--
THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:
https://www.famm.com/en/
https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037
Follow us:
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic
Music by Ben Wetherfield -
I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the world expert in myths, folklore, and occultism in art, Dr. Amy Hale speaking on the great surrealist Ithell Colquhoun!
An Atlanta based writer, curator and critic, Hale’s interests range from contemporary magical practice to the history of art, culture, women and Cornwall.
She has helped crack open this side of art history, and that is why I am so excited to be speaking with her today – and focussing on the artistic polymath, Ithell Colquhoun, who, as well as being the most brilliant painter – creating scapes of dreamlike worlds, with organic, bodily-like shapes – was a novelist, poet, essayist, and more. Her output was always concerned spiritual transcendence.
Born in 1906 in India, before studying at the Slade, Colquhoun became involved with the Surrealists in the 1930s – making dazzling paintings of sea monsters – and it was at this moment that her interest in the occult soared. In the 1940s, she relocated from London to Cornwall, and invented a way of working that connected her to the earth, and ancient times.
Colquhoun, according to Hale, had a “magical mind that never stopped” – and Hale has dedicated her career to writing her noted biography Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern Loved Gully (Strange Attractor) and, more recently, the collection Sex Magic: Diagrams of Love, and is editing a selection of her esoteric essays. So I couldn’t be more delighted to find out more!
--
LINKS:
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/ithell-colquhoun-931
Amy's books:
https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/ithell-colquhoun-genius-of-the-fern-loved-gulley-amy-hale
https://shop.tate.org.uk/sex-magic-ithell-colquhouns-diagrams-of-love/28593.html
Ithell's paintings:
https://artuk.org/discover/artists/colquhoun-ithell-19061988
--
THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:
https://www.famm.com/en/
https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037
Follow us:
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic
Music by Ben Wetherfield -
I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the esteemed photographer, filmmaker and director, Sam Taylor-Johnson. Born in Croydon and educated at Goldsmiths, where she was among the stars of the 1990s British art scene Taylor Johnson made her name with her non-narrative films, such as Method in Madness, where a young man appears to be having a nervous breakdown on camera; Hysteria of a young woman miming in hysterical laughter; or Breach of a girl who cries in silence – art that seems to be about our shared internal pain, and the performance we all put on in our everyday lives. In 1997, she won Most Promising Artist at the Venice Biennale, and in 1998 was up for the Turner Prize. Sadly, cancer took over at aged 30, an experience that no doubt shifted the output of work in the early 2000s. Still Life was a film that showed decaying fruit, and others explored the threshold between life and death, fantasy and reality, and what it meant to confront our own mortality. She has especially looked at the real lives of celebrities, from an almost mythic lens, such as her film David, of David Beckham sleeping at the National Portrait Gallery – that I remember seeing aged 10 – and her incredibly moving series of famous male actors crying, from Philip Seymour Hoffman to Robin Williams – that is currently on view at the V&A’s Fragile Beauty exhibition, a phrase that so perfectly sums up so much of Taylor Johnson’s work, the complexity of performance and artifice, and the glamour and beauty of pop often masked by darkness. Since 2009, she has become one of Britain’s foremost movie directors, making her feature debut with Nowhere Boy, a portrait of the early life of John Lennon, and most recently, Back to Black, that zooms in on Amy Winehouse fragile but enormously celebrated life, showing her as the human she was, who loved most in the world people and music… I can’t help but see the correlation between Taylor Johnson’s fine art work and her movie work: that deep interest in intense stories that appear on the outer side as one, and on the inner as another. She gets to the core of the human condition through her work, and leaves us contemplating our own existence, how we view those whose music, voice and lyrics we know like they’re in the DNA of our fingertips, and I really couldn’t be more excited to find out more.--LINKS:Back to Black: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21261712/Nowhere Boy: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1266029/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_nowhere%2520boyA Million Little Pieces: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427543/Fragile Beauty at V&A: https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/fragile-beauty-photographs-from-the-sir-elton-john-and-david-furnish-collectionCrying Men series: https://hickeyguy.wordpress.com/2014/09/13/crying-men/JFK photograph by Gary Winogrand: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/113229David @ NPG: https://www.npg.org.uk/beyond/exhibitions/partnership/2019/coming-home-david-beckham--THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:https://www.famm.com/en/https://www.instagram.com/famm.mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037Follow us:Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hesselSound editing by Nada SmiljanicMusic by Ben Wetherfield
-
I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the esteemed writer and novelist, Chloe Aridjis, speaking on her friend, LEONORA CARRINGTON!
Born in New York City, raised in the Netherlands and then Mexico City, Aridjis is a writer of numerous award-winning books, including three novels: Book of Clouds, Asunder, and Sea Monsters.
Aridjis is also the author of numerous books and essays, including an A–Z profile on the artist we are very excitingly discussing today: Leonora Carrington, the great late British-born painter, who ran away to Paris in her teens before escaping Europe at the outbreak of the Second World War, and settling in Mexico City in the 40s, where she lived until her death in 2011.
And it was in Mexico City that Aridjis got to know the surrealist, who she had tea with on Sundays and noted their extroardnary conversations that she published in, among others, Tea and Creatures with Leonora Carrington: A Photo Essay… a beautiful piece that looks at their friendship. In 2015, Aridjis went on to co-curate a major exhibition of Carrington’s work at Tate Liverpool, affirming her as one of the greatest and most relevant artists to today’s world.
This episode is going to be slightly different to usual, as back in 2019 – for one of our first ever podcast episodes – we discussed the life of Leonora Carrington with her biographer cousin, Joanna Moorhead. We also discussed Carrington briefly with writer Deborah Levy – so do check those out. But! Today I couldn’t be more excited to be delving into Arjidis’s memories with the artist, uncovering the mystical symbolism that populates her work – from vegetables to cats, eggs to giants, cauldrons to kitchens, underworlds to hybridised figures – her friendships, character, and of course her paintings and writings, too.
LINKS:
PAINTINGS DISCUSSED ––
Giantess, c.1947: https://www.artbook.com/blog-featured-image-leonora-carrington.html
Green Tea, 1942: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/297568
And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur, 1953: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/393384?artist_id=993&page=1&sov_referrer=artist
The Magical World of the Maya, 1963: https://maria-cristina.medium.com/great-art-the-magical-world-of-the-maya-by-leonora-carrington-interpretation-and-analysis-b642f8d04cf0
Self Portrait, 1937: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/492697
Chloe's exhibition: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/leonora-carrington
--
THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:
https://www.famm.com/en/
https://www.instagram.com/famm.mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037
Follow us:
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic
Music by Ben Wetherfield -
I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the esteemed classicist, mythologist, comedian, writer and broadcaster, Natalie Haynes!
The author of eight books, three non-fiction and five fiction, Haynes is hailed for her retellings of ancient myths, and the story of the Trojan War from a female point of view in her highly acclaimed A Thousand Ships, which was shortlisted for the women’s prize. Her first book, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life, showed us what the ancient world has to offer us now, and other books, such as Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths, is an important book that centres the women at the heart of these ancient stories.
Haynes regulars writers for the Guardian, contributes to BBC Radio 4, and is the host of the BBC podcast series, Natalie Haynes Stands Up For The Classics, a witty and incredibly informative series that charts the stories of poets like Sappho, as well as goddesses, mortals, monsters and more, for the ancient world, while also making them extremely accessible and enjoyable for classicists and non-classicists.
But, the reason why we are talking with Haynes today is because she is also the author of a fantastic book, Stone Blind, which retells the story of the gorgon Medusa, who, originally in mythology, was cursed by Athena who turned her hair into snakes and gave her the power to turn everything she looked into to stone, and who was then decapitated and killed by the hero Perseus. But Haynes looks at this story again, from a different and more sympathetic point of view, exposing the way stories have been passed down to us and for me, the importance of questioning traditions. And that is why I couldn’t be more excited to be zooming in on this mythical creature today, thinking about how she has been represented and reinterpreted, in addition to the myths behind monsters…!
Natalie's books:
https://www.waterstones.com/author/natalie-haynes/450500
Natalie's podcast:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b077x8pc
More info:
https://nataliehaynes.com/
MEDUSA IMAGES:
Cellini in Florence square: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perseus_with_the_Head_of_Medusa
Giordano in National Gallery:
https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/luca-giordano-perseus-turning-phineas-and-his-followers-to-stone
Canova in The Met:
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/204758
Jar in The Met:
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/254523
--
--
THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:
https://www.famm.com/en/
https://www.instagram.com/famm.mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037
Follow us:
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic
Music by Ben Wetherfield -
I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is one of the most pioneering and revelatory artists alive, Judy Chicago.
Born Judith Sylvia Cohen, then Judy Gerowitz, but changed it to Judy Chicago to renounce the name of her first husband to instead adopt the name of her birth city instead, Chicago has been at the forefront of art since the 1960s. Following her studies at UCLA in the 1950s, Chicago attended auto body school, as the only woman out of 250 men. It was here that she learnt to use spray guns, but instead of actually painting cars, she used these skills to formulate vaginal forms onto carhoods, as if to poke fun at her male contemporaries.
In the 1960s, she turned to Minimalism, creating block-like sculptures which she executed in exuberant colours. While her work was acclaimed, she was one of only three women (out of 51 artists) included in the landmark Jewish Museum exhibition, Primary Structures, in 1966.
During this decade, she became increasingly aware of the lack of women artists available to her – as an undergraduate at UCLA in the late 1950s and 60s, she had taken a class titled the Intellectual History of Europe, where her professor declared that women had made zero contributions to European History – so she set herself the task of looking for it herself. As she has said “there was actually a huge amount of information if one looked for it, especially dating back to the 19th century…”
Out of this – and turning to the importance of education – she began the first ever feminist art programme, at Fresno State College, with artist Miriam Schapiro in 1970, which, as feminist art historian, Linda Nochlin has declared, was a time when there were no women’s studies, no feminist theory, no African American studies, no queer theory, no postcolonial studies. What there was ... was a seamless web of great art, often called “The Pyramids to Picasso”... extolling great (male, of course) artistic achievement since the very dawn of history’...
In the 1970s, Chicago created the famous Dinner Party, worked on between 1974 and 1978: a giant minimalist-like table that awards 39 women from history and mythology a ‘seat at the table’ – with the further names of 999 women in the porcelain in the middle.
She has created images of birth, death, animals, plants, that deal with an attitude entrenched in feminism towards caring for our planet, and so much more. But! The reason why we are speaking to her today is because this summer in London, Chicago will take over the Serpentine Gallery with an exhibition that corresponds to her major new book: Revelations, a project that has been unrealised for over 30 years, but is finally being published, that includes rewriting the story of creation, spotlighting the Great Mother Goddess, and a plethora of other women, and challenging the patriarchal paradigms that have always dictated how stories have been read, written, and accepted.
--
LINKS:
https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/judy-chicago-revelations/?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwo6GyBhBwEiwAzQTmc3bNjJ0zjNj2RgMuZomrRmjd8Bhuvx6YlLjhkJ8sk0ZYIgxU_IQVmRoCEWoQAvD_BwE
https://www.thamesandhudsonusa.com/books/judy-chicago-revelations-hardcover
https://judychicago.com/
https://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/judy-chicago-herstory
--
THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:
https://www.famm.com/en/
https://www.instagram.com/famm.mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037
Follow us:
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic
Music by Ben Wetherfield -
I am so thrilled to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is one of the most esteemed curators in the world, Naomi Beckwith.
Currently the Deputy Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY, where she plays an instrumental role in shaping the museum’s vision, Beckwith’s career has seen her curate some of the groundbreaking shows in recent years. At the MCA Chicago, she curated Howardena Pindell: What Remains to Be Seen – the first survey of the 20th and 21st century pioneer, as well as The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music that looked at the legacy of 1960s African American avant-garde and its impact on art and culture today. Among many others, she also staged the first ever US solo exhibition by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Beckwith was part of the team that realised Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, conceived by Okwui Enwezor for the New Museum, as well as shows featuring Arthur Jafa and Laurie Simmons. She has dedicated her career to the impact of identity and multidisciplinary practices within contemporary art, and has just been granted the David Driskell Prize 2024.
But the reason why we are speaking with Beckwith today is because she has just unveiled a new group exhibition at the Guggenheim – By Way of Working – that brings together artists across mediums, and generations – from Mona Hatoum, Joseph Beuys, Robert Rauschenberg, and Senga Nengudi: the artist we are very excitingly discussing today. Chicago-born Nengudi is hailed for her works across sculpture to performance, that explore the human form in all its many iterations through her early training in dance, and I can’t wait to find out more.
--
LINKS:
Naomi's exhibition: https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/by-way-of-material-and-motion-in-the-guggenheim-collection
https://www.guggenheim.org/about-us/staff/naomi-beckwith
https://www.sengasenga.com/
https://www.artnews.com/feature/senga-nengudi-who-is-she-why-is-she-important-1234591161/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DutixbTscWM
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5078
--
THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:
https://www.famm.com/en/
https://www.instagram.com/famm.mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037
Follow us:
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic
Music by Ben Wetherfield - Montre plus
