In episode 58 of The Great Women Artists Podcast, Katy Hessel interviews the esteemed art historian, Diane Radycki, on the groundbreaking German Modernist PAULA MODERSOHN BECKER!!! [This episode is brought to you by Alighieri jewellery: www.alighieri.co.uk | use the code TGWA at checkout for 10% off!] And WOW, is this one of the most incredible stories in art history. A precursor to German Expressionism, Modersohn Becker was not only one of the first German artists to bring the intense and dazzling colours and brushstrokes to her home country, but the first woman artist in HISTORY to paint herself nude!!  Born in 1876, Modersohn Becker was raised in Bremen, attended art school in St John's Wood, London, went on to study at the traditional Society of Berlin Women Artists, and after spending a summer visiting the Worpswede art colony, settled with the group from 1898. However, she wasn't satisfied.  On the stroke of a new century, 1 January 1900, Modersohn Becker took a train heading for Paris, and it was here where she became enraptured by the French Modernists, their vibrant, fragmented forms. But most importantly, where she was exposed to drawing from the nude figure! Taking up portraits and scenes of peasant life, Modersohn-Becker’s work exuded strong, sun-drenched intense colouring and dynamism, full of expression and emotion (in 1902 she recalled, ‘personal feeling is the main thing’). But having returned to Germany, during this time she was stifled by her marriage, sucked into Worpswede life and longing for Paris. Retuning for the last time in 1906, she abandoned her life: ‘I have left Otto Modersohn and stand poised between my new life. What will it be like? And what will I be like in my new life? Now it is all about to happen.’  During spring and summer of 1906, Modersohn-Becker produced dozens of paintings. Predominantly self-portraits and portraits of un-idealised, unconventional, and un-sensual looking women, she filled with canvases with simplified flattened forms. Radickye makes the convincing case that Modersohn Becker was even the influence behind Picasso's Gertrude Stein! Immersed in her life in Paris, attending exhibitions, Modersohn-Becker was enjoying life as a free woman. But having returned to Germany in 1907, where she was to give birth that October, aged 31, she died just a few days later, leaving behind over 700 paintings and 1000 drawings.. Don't miss this AMAZING story as told by Radickye – the woman responsible for MoMA's acquisition of a Self Portrait by Paula. Further links: Diane's book! https://yalebooks.co.uk/display.asp?k=9780300185300https://www.moma.org/artists/4037 https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/paula-modersohn-becker-kunsthalle-bremen/UAKCairRWHB0KQ?hl=en https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/paula-modersohn-becker-modern-paintings-missing-piece https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/26/arts/design/paula-modersohn-becker-and-her-thwarted-ambitions.html https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/paula-modersohn-becker-modern-paintings-missing-piece 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 57 of The Great Women Artists Podcast, Katy Hessel interviews the esteemed curator of the Woodman Foundation, Katarina Jerinic on the GROUNDBREAKING photographer, Francesca Woodman!!! [This episode is brought to you by Alighieri jewellery: www.alighieri.co.uk | use the code TGWA at checkout for 10% off!] And WOW is this an incredible insight to the American photographer, who in her short career produced an extraordinary body of work (over 800 photographs) acclaimed for its unique style and range of innovative techniques. Born in Colorado in 1958, at the age of thirteen Francesca Woodman took her first self-portrait. From then, up until her untimely death in 1981, aged just 22, she produced incredibly visceral, expressive, dreamlike and gothic-like photographs. From the beginning: she was both the subject and object in her work.  Fragmenting her body hiding behind furniture, using reflective surfaces such as mirrors to conceal herself, or simply cropping the image, Woodman uses photography to emphasise the isolated body parts of the human figure. Slightly surrealist, her hauntingly narrative, small-scale photographs are almost akin to plays. They are at once theatrical, Baroque and operatic, as well as still and silent. In this incredibly in-depth insight into her career as told by Jerinic, who was close to Francesca's artist parents, Betty and George Woodman, we are given a full appreciation for Woodman's life and work. From growing up in Italy, attending RISD, and her final years in New York.  Since 1986, Woodman's work has been exhibited widely and has been the subject of extensive critical study in the United States and Europe. Woodman is often situated alongside her contemporaries of the late 1970s such as Ana Mendieta and Hannah Wilke, yet her work also foreshadows artists such as Cindy Sherman, Sarah Lucas, Nan Goldin and Karen Finley in their subsequent dialogues with the self and reinterpretations of the female body. ENJOY!! Further links: https://www.woodmanfoundation.org/ WORKS DISCUSSED: Self Portrait, Aged 13, 1972 https://www.woodmanfoundation.org/artworks/self-portrait-at-13 https://www.victoria-miro.com/artists/7-francesca-woodman/ Space 2 Series (Nature Lab), 1975–76 https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/aug/31/searching-for-the-real-francesca-woodman#img-2 Space2 Series, 1976 https://www.woodmanfoundation.org/artworks/untitled-13 Polka Dots Series, 1976 https://www.woodmanfoundation.org/artworks/from-polka-dots Angel Series, Rome, Italy, 1977 https://www.woodmanfoundation.org/artworks/from-angel-series Untitled, 1977–78 https://www.woodmanfoundation.org/artworks/untitled-4 Eel Series, Venice, 1978 https://www.woodmanfoundation.org/artworks/from-eel-series Blueprint for a Temple, 1980 https://www.woodmanfoundation.org/artworks/blueprint-for-a-temple 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 56 of The Great Women Artists Podcast, Katy Hessel interviews Loretta Pettway Bennett and Mary Margaret Pettway of the GEE'S BEND QUILTMAKERS! [This episode is brought to you by Alighieri jewellery: www.alighieri.co.uk | use the code TGWA at checkout for 10% off!] Located in a small, remote and rural community in Alabama, USA, officially known as Boykin, which is surrounded on three sides by river and has a population of around 700, the women of Gee’s Bend have been creating hundreds of quilt masterpieces dating from the early twentieth century to the present day. Electric, off-beat, full of flair, as well as both vivid and vibrant, for decades, the women of Gee’s Bend have adopted a wide range of material for their improvisatory, jazzy and geometric quilts. From denim to old patterned clothes, which they have referred to as, making something shine from something that has been thrown away.  Often quilting - and singing - in groups as they configure their stunning works, some of the women of Gee’s Bend are in the collection of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the preservation and promotion of the contributions of African American artists from the Southern states, of which our guest and quilter extraordinaire, Mary Margaret Pettway is chair.  Although having been quilting for decades, with some claiming the tradition stemming from the 1800s, it has only been in recent years that the women have come to international renown and attention, exhibiting at major museums all over the world, from the Whitney Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, New York’s The Met, Margate’s Turner Contemporary, and now, their first ever solo exhibition in my hometown of London at Alison Jacques Gallery, which shows quilts spanning nearly 100 years. I should add that our guests today are first cousins, who come from an important lineage of female quilters and are showing alongside three generations worth of ancestors.  Described by the New York Times as having created some of “the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced”, the women of Gee’s Bend are rightfully forcing us to readdress the art historical canon, and I couldn’t be more delighted to have them on the show today.  ENJOY!!! FURTHER LINKS! The Gee's Bend website!  https://www.soulsgrowndeep.org/gees-bend-quiltmakers Their show at Alison Jacques Gallery (don't miss if you're in London!) https://www.alisonjacquesgallery.com/exhibitions/192/overview/ More:  https://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/29/arts/art-review-jazzy-geometry-cool-quilters.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHEqYVzSs7U 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 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/