The Great Women Artists

In episode 55 of The Great Women Artists Podcast, Katy Hessel interviews Dr Sue Tate on the incredible British Pop Artist, PAULINE BOTY !!!!!!!! [This episode is brought to you by Alighieri jewellery: www.alighieri.co.uk | use the code TGWA at checkout for 10% off!] One of the most important artists to change the face of British Pop Art (as well as being an Actress, TV star, radio commentator, a blonde who read Proust) Boty EPITOMISED the possibilities of the modern Pop woman. Known for capturing the glamour and vivacity of the 1960s, including those of music stars to film icons, think Marylin to Elvis, Boty worshipped the proliferation of imagery available in the post-War era. Born in Croydon in 1938, Boty studied stained glass at the Royal College of Art (when it was not deemed necessary to include female loos in the school), before going onto painting, and thrived. Translating the energy of contemporary life onto her flat-paned and bold early-mid 60s canvases, it was with warmth, mischief, humour, and fun, that Boty portrayed film stars to music icons that didn’t just explore the potential of the proliferated image, but captured them from a distinct and female point of view. “It’s almost like painting mythology, a present-day mythology – film stars, etc. The 20th-century gods and goddesses. People need them, and the myths that surround them, because their own lives are enriched by them. Pop art colours those myths.” A true great whose paintings – and personality – reflected, challenged, and emulated the time, Boty's life was sadly cut short aged 28 by cancer, in the summer of 1966, five months after giving birth. But it is through the vibrancy of her electric work that keeps the spirit of her soul alive. And my god does this story break my heart.  Dr Sue Tate is THE leading expert in Boty's life and work. Without sue’s work, conducting important primary research starting in the early 90s when Boty was barely known, in 1998 co-curating, for two London Galleries, the first solo show of Boty’s work in the UK for 35 years, In 2013 curating a major retrospective of Boty’s work at Wolverhampton Art Gallery, that toured to Pallent House Chichester and to Lodz, Poland, and authored the brilliant accompanying book Pauline Boty Pop Artist and Woman, we would not know about this brilliant, important and formative artist.  ENJOY!!! FURTHER LINKS! Pop Goes The Easel:  https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00drs8y/monitor-pop-goes-the-easel Read Ali Smith on Pauline Boty:  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/22/ali-smith-the-prime-of-pauline-boty NY Times Obituary:  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/obituaries/pauline-boty-overlooked.html Boty's Stained Glass Self Portrait:  https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw272908/Pauline-Boty?LinkID=mp10131&role=sit&rNo=0 Boty's works as discussed:  https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/pauline-boty-2684 https://artuk.org/discover/artists/boty-pauline-19381966 Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Laura Hendry  Artwork by @thisisaliceskinner Music by Ben Wetherfield https://www.thegreatwomenartists.com/

In episode 54 of The Great Women Artists Podcast, Katy Hessel interviews the LEGENDARY artist Howardena Pindell !!!! [This episode is brought to you by Alighieri jewellery: www.alighieri.co.uk | use the code TGWA at checkout for 10% off!] Working across a variety of mediums, from painting to film, and who has employed a range of unconventional materials, such as glitter to talcum powder; since the late 1960s, Howardena Pindell has examined a wide range of subject matter, from the personal, historical, political and social for her highly important and activistic like work that deals with racism, feminism, violence and exploitation. Born in 1943 in Philadelphia, Pindell first studied painting at Boston University and later Yale University, and upon graduating, accepted a job in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books at the Museum of Modern Art, where she remained for 12 years, from 1967 to 1979. A co-founder of the pioneering feminist A.I.R Gallery, Pindell is also a professor at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, where she has been since 1979.  Renowned early works include her mesmeric and labour intensive, pointillist paintings of the 1970s, created by spraying paint through a template, and Free, White and 21, a video made in 1980 in which the artist plays herself and, wearing a mask, a white woman, whose conversation relays Pindell’s own experiences of racism, which was first shown at artist Ana Mendieta’s curated exhibition at AIR in 1980.  Currently the subject of a major exhibition right now at New York’s The Shed, a show examining the violent, historical trauma of racism in America and the therapeutic power of artistic creation, other recent museum solo exhibitions have included at the MCA Chicago, Rose Museum, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, as well as an upcoming exhibition at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge.  Pindell has also featured in recent landmark group exhibitions such as the touring Soul of a Nation: Art in the age of Black Power, We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–1985 at the Brooklyn Museum, and WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, at LACMA. Among many many others.  Addressing important subjects that continue to educate people around the world, when asked about her viewers Howardena recently said in an interview, “I want them to look at the hidden history instead of the history we were taught”. And that is why we are so lucky to have her work out on the world stage, and I couldn't be more delighted to be speaking with her today. ENJOY!!! FURTHER LINKS! https://www.howardenapindell.org/https://theshed.org/program/143-howardena-pindell-rope-fire-water https://mcachicago.org/Exhibitions/2018/Howardena-Pindell https://www.garthgreenan.com/artists/howardena-pindell https://www.victoria-miro.com/artists/216-howardena-pindell/ Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Laura Hendry  Artwork by @thisisaliceskinner Music by Ben Wetherfield https://www.thegreatwomenartists.com/

WELCOME BACK TO SEASON 5 of the GWA PODCAST! In episode 53 of The Great Women Artists Podcast, Katy Hessel interviews the renowned curator and executive director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Elizabeth Smith, on the trailblazing and legendary HELEN FRANKENTHALER (1928–2011) !!!! [This episode is brought to you by Alighieri jewellery: www.alighieri.co.uk | use the code TGWA at checkout for 10% off!] With a career spanning six decades, Helen Frankenthaler has long been recognized as one of the great American artists of the twentieth century. A member of the second generation of postwar American abstract painters, she is widely credited with playing a pivotal role in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting. Through her invention of the soak-stain technique, she expanded the possibilities of abstraction, while at times referencing figuration and landscape in highly personal ways. She produced a body of work whose impact on contemporary art has been profound and continues to grow. Born on December 12, 1928, and raised in New York. She attended the Dalton School, where she received her earliest art instruction from Rufino Tamayo. In 1949 she graduated from Bennington College, and by the early 1950s had entered into the Downtown New York Art Scene. Exhibiting at the infamous Ninth Street Show in 1951 (alongside Krasner, Mitchell, and others), Frankenthaler's breakthrough came in 1952 when she created Mountains and Sea, her first soak-stain painting. She poured thinned paint directly onto raw, unprimed canvas laid on the studio floor, working from all sides to create floating fields of translucent colour. The work catalysed the Colour Field School and was particularly influential for artists of her generation. In 1959, Frankenthaler had won first prize at the Premiere Biennale de Paris, by 1960 had her first major solo exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York, and by 1969 was one of four artists to represent America at the Venice Biennale. Oh! AND she had a Whitney Museum solo exhibition of the same year. She was invisible. I LOVED recording this episode with Elizabeth Smith about the fascinating life and work of Frankenthaler. ENJOY!!! Works discussed: Nature Abhors a Vacuum, 1973 Cloud Burst, 2002 Pink Lady, 1963 Mountains and Sea, 1952 Jacob's Ladder, 1957 Flood, 1967 FURTHER LINKS! https://www.frankenthalerfoundation.org/artworks/paintings https://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/2021/may/helen-frankenthaler-radical-beauty/ https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/Helen-Frankenthaler https://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-modern/display/studio/helen-frankenthaler https://gagosian.com/news/museum-exhibitions/pittura-panorama-paintings-by-helen-frankenthaler-museo-di-palazzo-grimani-venice/ Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Laura Hendry Artwork by @thisisaliceskinner Music by Ben Wetherfield https://www.thegreatwomenartists.com/

In episode 52 of The Great Women Artists Podcast, Katy Hessel interviews the renowned art historian Rebecca K. VanDiver on the trailblazing and legendary LOIS MAILOU JONES (1905–1998) !!!! [This episode is brought to you by Alighieri jewellery: www.alighieri.co.uk | use the code TGWA at checkout for 10% off!] Born in Boston, had her first exhibition aged 17, and found herself in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, Lois Mailou Jones had an EXTENSIVE artistic career that spanned almost an entire century, and an oeuvre that ranged from traditional portraits, Haitian landscapes, to African-themed abstraction. Born to accomplished, upper-middle-class, professional parents in Boston, Jones spent her early years surrounded by the cultural elite on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, including sculptor Meta Warwick Fuller, a mentor to the young Jones and encouraging her to study in Paris. Continuously awarded scholarships to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts associated with the Boston Museum, the always highly determined Jones originally pursued textiles (however soon retracted after finding out that designers’ names weren’t recognised in the same as painters). An educator for nearly 50 years, she first got a job at PalmerMemorial School (which she would drive down to in her sports car, as well as coach basketball!), and in 1930 was personally recruited to teach at Howard University, the epicentre of Black intellectualism (her students included Elizabeth Catlett, and painter Alma Thomas was her neighbour in DC!). Spending many summers of the 1920s immersed in the Harlem Renaissance, between 1937–8 Jones ventured to Paris on sabbatical, where she adopted an impressionist-like style, painting ‘en plein air’. Like so many of her contemporaries of the Harlem Renaissance, Jones felt welcome as an artist in Paris. Developing her negotiations with African themes in her work, such as Les Fetiches, 1937, a small painting of African masks, it was on her return to America that she was encouraged by Harlem Renaissance gatekeeper, Alain Locke, to further embrace the everyday life of African American people. Honoured by numerous presidents, granted a Lois Mailou Jones Day AND Avenue in America, it wasn't until her elderly age that she took America by storm. And WOW. Has she had an impact on American art. ENJOY!!!! Rebecca K Vandiver is a RENOWNED scholar, and has just written a book on LMJ! See here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/designing-a-new-tradition/rebecca-vandiver//9780271086040 FURTHER LINKS! https://www.rebeccavandiver.com/ https://americanart.si.edu/artist/lo%C3%AFs-mailou-jones-5658 https://nmwa.org/art/artists/lois-mailou-jones/ https://hyperallergic.com/600201/lois-mailou-jones-an-artist-and-educator-who-made-history/ Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Laura Hendry  Artwork by @thisisaliceskinner Music by Ben Wetherfield https://www.thegreatwomenartists.com/

In episode 51 of The Great Women Artists Podcast, Katy Hessel interviews the incredible London-based illustrator and artist, POLLY NOR! [This episode is brought to you by Alighieri jewellery: www.alighieri.co.uk | use the code TGWA at checkout for 10% off!] Best known for her dark and satirical drawings of women and their demons, Polly’s work interweaves themes of identity, sexuality, and emotional turmoil in her bold, bright, hilarious and disturbing semi-surrealist dream-like work. Looking at sexuality and the female experience in the internet age, Polly’s incredibly imaginative drawings tell the story of often house-bound women and their demons in the form of an all-consuming devil-like character that appear in her hand-drawn and digital illustrations, sculptures and installations. Creating worlds around them – whether that be from their bedrooms to the bottom of the sea – Polly’s all-consuming drawings have the ability to transport us to the deepest part of our minds, that feel more relatable than work found in any museums.  Although graduating in 2011, Polly’s rise to fame has been predominantly online, having amassed over one million followers on Instagram with her art inspiring a generation of illustrators worldwide who are breaking taboos around the female experience.  Having had numerous solo shows, as well as creating extraordinarily brilliant animations for Chelou’s Half to Nowhere video – genuinely the most incredible music video I have ever seen – and now narrative-based animations with director Andy Baker for WeTransfer, Polly’s characters, who are based on real, non-judgmental women going about their private life, are some of the most fascinating, complex, real, hilarious, I have ever witnessed in my life, and that is why I am so excited to say that she is the artist who we will be speaking to today! FURTHER LINKS: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pollynor Works discussed: https://www.instagram.com/p/CDtqUpYD0jX/ https://www.instagram.com/p/CA5eYTkjuMO/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BzOxN7bl9hH/ https://www.instagram.com/p/CGr7Gu8DxXN/ https://www.instagram.com/p/CF7zWDLj_EX/ Chelou music video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgP9tzt9_Z8 Latest animation, 'How Have You Been?':  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjVCVdx8kKk&has_verified=1 Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Laura Hendry (@lghendry) Artwork by @thisisaliceskinner Music by Ben Wetherfield https://www.thegreatwomenartists.com/

In episode 50 (!!!) of The Great Women Artists Podcast, Katy Hessel interviews the legendary, trailblazing, feminist art history ICON, GRISELDA POLLOCK on the pioneering Polish Jewish artist, Alina Szapocznikow.  [This episode is brought to you by Alighieri jewellery: www.alighieri.co.uk | use the code TGWA at checkout for 10% off!] Author, editor, curator, and Professor, Griselda Pollock's 43-year-plus career as an art historian is nothing short of LEGENDARY. Having co-authored (with Rozsika Parker), “Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology”, written 26 books, and edited many more, Pollock's indefatigable career has seen her spend decades developing an international, queer, postcolonial, feminist analysis of art’s diverse histories. Writing extensively on artists Eva Hesse, Lubaina Himid, Georgia O’Keeffe, to Tracey Emin, Pollock has curated numerous museum exhibitions, made several films, and has two forthcoming publications out for release.  But the reason why we are speaking to Griselda today is because as well as being a social and feminist historian of  19th and 20th century and contemporary art she is also a transdisciplinary cultural analyst focussing in Cultural Studies and Jewish studies, which is where her fantastic, tireless work on the great sculptor, Alina Szapocznikow comes into play. Born in Poland to an intellectual Jewish family of doctors in 1926, Alina Szapocznikow survived internment in concentration camps during the Holocaust as a teenager. [TW: we discuss The Holocaust]. At her liberation in 1945, she moved first to Prague, and then to Paris, where she studied sculpture and took up a job at a stonemasons, and then was forced back to Poland in 1951 after suffering from tuberculosis. When the Polish government loosened controls over creative freedom following Stalin’s death in 1952, Szapocznikow moved into figurative abstraction and then a pioneering form of representation. By the 1960s, she was radically re-conceptualizing sculpture as an intimate record not only of her memory, but also of her own body. First casting parts of the body as fragments, on her return to Paris as part of 'Nouveau Realisme', she began to move into casting bulbous shapes cast in resin from human bellies, lipstick red lips, nipples and lips growing from slender stems like flowers and serving as lamps. Surrounded by an artistic community that included Niki de Saint Phalle and more, in this episode we discuss Szapocznikow's incredible life and career, her involvement in the evolution of new materials and new ways of thinking, whilst simultaneously trying to deal with the horrors of the past – as with her American contemporaries, Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, and Hannah Wilke.  AS's Self Portrait: https://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/2012/alina-szapocznikow-sculpture-undone-1955-1972 Photosculptures (chewing gum): https://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/2012/alina-szapocznikow-sculpture-undone-1955-1972 Lamp works: https://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/2012/alina-szapocznikow-sculpture-undone-1955-1972 Tumour series: https://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/2012/alina-szapocznikow-sculpture-undone-1955-1972 Further images and information: https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/16711-alina-szapocznikow?modal=media-player&mediaType=artwork&mediaId=16719 Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Laura Hendry  Artwork by @thisisaliceskinner Music by Ben Wetherfield https://www.thegreatwomenartists.com/

In episode 49 of The Great Women Artists Podcast, Katy Hessel interviews the incredible data journalist and artist, MONA CHALABI!!!! [This episode is brought to you by Alighieri jewellery: www.alighieri.co.uk | use the code TGWA at checkout for 10% off!] Currently the Data editor of the Guardian US, a position she has held for the past seven years, the London-born but now New York-based Chalabi is known for her outstanding data-informed visualisations and drawings that range from addressing stats around gender imbalances in museums, to hate crimes and immigration issues to what time of day Americans might eat pizza. Bold, full of colour, and often hand-drawn directly onto graph or square paper, it is with humour and wit that Chalabi pushes boundaries to challenge societal assumptions and habits that have come to affect the way we live and think.  Having exhibited at the Tate, Design Museum, the V&A Glasgow and more, and created illustrations for the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Netflix – as well as to her 400,000+ strong Instagram following, where you can find so much of her work – Chalabi has also written and presented for the BBC, National Geographic, Channel 4 and VICE, and was nominated for an Emmy for her video series Vagina Dispatches for the Guardian.  Commended by the Royal Statistical society, nominated for a Beazley Design of the Year award, and a former columnist for Five Thirty Eight called Dear Mona, Chalabi is translating spreadsheets into written pieces, illustration, audio and film for the modern-day consumer, allowing us all to enjoy, interact with her reliable data sources, as she breaks down the wall between complex information, art and illustration.  And on a personal level, it has been this year more than ever, with the current Coronavirus pandemic, Black Lives Matter Movement and the American election, that Mona’s data-informed works have resonated with people around the world. By using the power of art and illustration, she has allowed us to consume complex information in ways that I never thought possible.  WORKS + CHART DISCUSSED IN THE EPISODE! MONA'S INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/monachalabi/ MONA'S WEBSITE: https://monachalabi.com/ Trump's Federal Income Tax: https://www.instagram.com/p/CFr6e73lkK6/ Mandatory paid vacation: https://www.instagram.com/p/CE1kpM5FhWR/ Rectal bleeding: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bc-WtaRF-zg/ Mark Zuckerberg's donation to Coronavirus: https://www.instagram.com/p/B-StLvnFtOE/  Museum statistics: https://www.instagram.com/p/BxGBMU7HuUh/ 100 New Yorkers: https://www.instagram.com/p/CBTKeNNl4NZ/ US Police Training: https://www.instagram.com/p/CBLWZM8lmUL/ Understanding Police Brutality: https://www.instagram.com/p/CAz86y0FYqM/ Breonna Taylor: https://www.instagram.com/p/CFh6Uu1Fpn8/ Active KKK Groups: https://www.instagram.com/p/BYMAj-xFJOf/ Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Laura Hendry  Artwork by @thisisaliceskinner Music by Ben Wetherfield https://www.thegreatwomenartists.com/

Highly esteemed National Gallery curator, Letizia Treves, discusses the revolutionary Baroque artist, Artemisia Gentileschi, known for her large-scale Biblical paintings. The episode dives into Gentileschi's resilience, her letters, and the impact of her exhibition at the National Gallery.

In episode 47 of The Great Women Artists Podcast, Katy Hessel interviews the highly esteemed, Cambridge University Art History professor and Surrealist EXPERT, Alyce Mahon on the magical LEONOR FINI (1907–1996) !!!!  [This episode is brought to you by Alighieri jewellery: www.alighieri.co.uk | use the code TGWA at checkout for 10% off!] The MATRIARCH of 20th century painting, known for her highly original works of supernatural portraits that empowered her female protagonists in the forms of sphinxes, Fini switched up gender roles like no other and was one of the most ground-breaking painters of the twentieth century. Born in Buenos Aires of mixed Spanish, Italian, and Argentine descent, Leonor escaped Argentina when she was 18 months old with her young mother, who raised her in Trieste where she was exposed to Mannerist and Renaissance painting, and her uncle's library where she read Freud and Jung. Fini, although known for her meticulously executed paintings, was completely self-taught.  With her intelligence, famous wit and charisma, she had garnered celebrity status in the Paris Avant Garde by the early 30s, and was exhibiting in the major surrealist exhibitions. But it was her portraits made in the late 30s and images of women in the forms of sphinxes that garnered her attention.  With the predominant themes in her art being sexual tensions, mysteries and games, her favoured subjects explored the interplay between the dominant female and the passive male. In many of her most powerful works the female takes the form of the sphinx to which she felt a strong identification. Whilst many of her peers ventured to New York and Mexico after World War II, Fini moved first to Rome and then back to Paris where she became an acclaimed set and costume designer for the likes of Fellini's film, Eight and a Half, and designed dresses and masquerades for Brigitte Bardot. WORKS DISCUSSED:  Self Portrait with a Scorpion (1938) Portrait of Meret Oppenheim (1938) The Alcove: An Interior with Three Women or The Black Room (1939) The Alcove/Self Portrait with Nico Papatakis (1941) Little Hermit Sphinx (Tate Collection) (1948) The Angel of Anatomy (1949) FURTHER LINKS! Alyce's fantastic exhibition: https://www.museumofsex.com/portfolio_page/leonor-fini/ Alyce's book! https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691141619/the-marquis-de-sade-and-the-avant-garde (use the code MAHON20 for 25% off!) https://www.weinstein.com/artists/leonor-fini/ https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/leonor-fini-5287 Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Laura Hendry  Artwork by @thisisaliceskinner Music by Ben Wetherfield https://www.thegreatwomenartists.com/

To mark the FIVE YEAR ANNIVERSARY of @thegreatwomenartists Instagram, in this very special episode, Katy Hessel interviews the trailblazing, fearless, ICONS Kathë Kollwitz and Frida Kahlo of the GUERRILLA GIRLS !!!!!  [This episode is brought to you by Alighieri jewellery: www.alighieri.co.uk | use the code TGWA at checkout for 10% off!] I don’t think I have ever been so excited! The anonymous feminist activist artist collective founded in 1985, who go by the guises of deceased female artists, the Guerrilla Girls are known to wear masks in public and use facts, humour, and outrageous and bold visuals to expose gender and ethnic bias in art, film, politics and in pop culture.  Working tirelessly for the past 35 years, the Guerrilla Girls have constantly fought discrimination and supported human rights for all people and all genders through their data-based artwork, which has been exhibited on buses, billboards, some of the biggest museums in the world – from the Tate to the Whitney – but also our very own bedrooms, including my own, with their aim being to spread equality and action through more than ninety posters, mugs, tea-towels, workbooks and more. Best known for their outrageous and witty statements including, “do women have to be naked to get into the met museum”, or “the advantages of being a woman artist”, it is through humour, bold graphics and data that the Guerrilla Girls catch our attention, and leave us wondering how just did museums get away with celebrating the history of patriarchy, as opposed to the history of art.  The most inspiring, encouraging, educational and unfortunately very needed artist collective out there, the Guerrilla Girls have changed – and are still changing – the story of art, one stunt at a time. I have been lucky enough to be the owner of much of their merchandise, and am delighted to say that they have just brought out a staggering new book,  The Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly, the first publication to catalog the entire career of the Guerrilla Girls from 1985 to present. ENJOY!!!!! FURTHER LINKS! https://www.guerrillagirls.com/ New book! https://www.guerrillagirls.com/store/the-art-of-behaving-badly Projects! https://www.guerrillagirls.com/projects Exhibitions! https://www.guerrillagirls.com/exhibitionshttps://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/guerrilla-girls-6858 Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Amber Miller (@amber_m.iller) Artwork by @thisisaliceskinner Music by Ben Wetherfield https://www.thegreatwomenartists.com/