Created off the back of @thegreatwomenartists Instagram, this podcast is all about celebrating women artists. Presented by art historian and curator, Katy Hessel, this podcast interviews artists on their career, or curators, writers, or general art lovers, on the female artist who means the most to them.
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Today on the GWA Podcast is the esteemed artist Firelei Baez!
Hailed for her paintings that explode with effervescent colour and are filled with elements from the natural and supernatural world, or hybridised figures morphing in and out of abstraction, Baez works on myriad surfaces to create deeper conversations about hierarchies in history. Her paintings are always embedded with so much meaning that, as well as being visually arresting and beautiful, revealed biases about our past while also being embedded in history. So much of her work is rooted in myth, such as the stories she grew up learning in the Dominican Republic about the female tricksters, ciguapas, as well as her interest in spirituality.
Born in 1980, Baez from age seven lived in Miami, and after hearing about a free art school in New York City, moved to the city to study at Cooper Union, then to Skowhegan, and back to New York to complete her Masters at Hunter College. In 2022, she was included in the formative Venice Biennale exhibition The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani, and since 2024, has been the subject of a major solo exhibition in the US organised by the ICA Boston, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among others.
In recent years, Baez's work has moved into sculpture, working in bronze in forms influenced by shapeshifting alien beings from the writings of Octavia Butler. She has also scaled up her painting work, working on canvases up to 50 feet wide that are nothing but an otherworldly yet worldly experience, showing nature back to us in the most profound of ways. And I cannot wait to find out more.
THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: www.famm.com/en/ www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037
Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Tory Pope
Co-produced with Molly Lafosse
Music by Ben Wetherfield
Mary Morton on Mary Cassatt
Tuesday, October 20, 2026 • Duration 49:13
Today on the GWA podcast is curator Mary Morton on the extraordinary painter Mary Cassatt!
Mary Morton is curator and head of the Department of French Paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, where she has organised exhibitions on the Impressionist movement, to shows centring on Corot, Cézanne and Gaugin. She has published extensively and in 2018 was awarded the Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by France's Ministry of Culture.
But the reason we are speaking with her today is because this November she will publish “Cassatt Reconsidered”, which looks at the life and work of the revolutionary artist Mary Cassatt, and how she was mishandled by the Parisian art establishment – and since by art historians who have narrowed her public perception to being a sentimental artist who only ever depicted one subject.
While celebrated for her pictures of mothers and children, Cassatt was also so much more. Born in Philadelphia in 1844, aged 21 Cassatt moved to Paris to pursue her artistic career, before being invited to join the Impressionists. Working at a time when the world was changing at drastic speed, Cassatt was also hugely independent, business savvy and fiercely ambitious. Over a 50 year career she produced some 600 oil and pastel paintings and 240 prints, her output ranging from an exploration of Japanese printmaking to a monumental feminist mural for the 1893 World's Exposition in Chicago. As Morton writes, her work was "distinguished by an intimacy and empathy of vision and psychological and emotional insight" and "disturbed conventional ideas of femininity, childhood and maternity" – and I can't wait to find out more.
"Cassatt Reconsidered" is published 24 November 2026: https://yalebooks.co.uk/book/9798887120508/cassatt-reconsidered/
THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: www.famm.com/en/ www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037
Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Tory Pope
Co-produced with Molly Lafosse
Music by Ben Wetherfield
Lisa Le Feuvre on Nancy Holt
Tuesday, October 13, 2026 • Duration 51:13
TODAY on the GWA Podcast is curator and writer Lisa Le Feuvre, on the acclaimed land artist NANCY HOLT!
The curator of over 75 exhibitions, including Casting a Glance: Dancing with Smithson at Marian Goodman Gallery, and Joan Jonas: An Island Departure at Farnsworth Art Museum among many others, Lisa Le Feuvre is also the executive director of the Holt Smithson Foundation, where she dedicates her work to the two pioneers of twentieth century art, hailed for their site specific interventions in the land – Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt, the latter of whom we are very excitedly discussing today.
Born in 1938 in Massachusetts and raised in New Jersey, Holt worked for over five decades across poetry, photography, film, outdoor, public sculpture commissions, room-sized installations and more. Central to the group of artists living and working in New York City in the 1960s, Holt, with Smithson, ventured further afield to the great expansive desert of the American West, and it was here where she found her language. From her Sun Tunnel works, made up of concrete tubes, each oriented so that the sun pours through them on the summer and winter solstices, to Trail Markers, images that document her trails through the natural landscapes and ancient monuments of the UK. Holt, through her art, always thinks about how humans orient themselves or understand their place in the world, on both a macro and micro level. While she works with myriad materials, in a sense, her tools are light and space, language and the cosmos, as she consistently explores humanity's relationship to the earth. As she once said, “I feel the need to look at the sky, at the moon and the stars, is very basic, and it is inside all of us. So when I say my work is an exteriorization of my own inner reality, I mean, I am giving back to people through art what they already have in them.” And I can't wait to find out more.
Nancy Holt at Goodwood Art Foundation, until 1 Nov: www.goodwoodartfoundation.org/art/nancy-holt-2026/
THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: www.famm.com/en/ www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037
Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Tory Pope
Co-produced with Molly Lafosse
Music by Ben Wetherfield
Edmund de Waal on Lucie Rie
Tuesday, October 6, 2026 • Duration 50:11
It's a new season of The Great Women Artists Podcast and we're kicking things off with the esteemed ceramicist and writer, Edmund de Waal!
Hailed for his ceramic works that come in the form of fragments, cylindrical pots, individually or collectively, or that use techniques such as the Japanese kinsugi - broken ceramics put back together with a gold liqueur to beautify its cracks and imperfections - de Waal has become one of the most renowned artists working in pots today. Speaking about his work, he has said, “my fantasy is that people will look at my pots and think: rigorous, yet passionate and humane.”
Born in 1964, de Waal grew up mostly in the deanery beside Canterbury Cathedral. He made his first pot aged five, glazing it in opalescent white, as he recalled, and aged seventeen, took an apprenticeship with the potter Geoffrey Whiting before travelling to Tokyo. Here he not only studied ceramics but became acquainted with his Uncle Iggy's collection of netsuke traditional miniature wood ivory carvings, which he uses as the starting point for his extraordinary family memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes. In the nineties, he moved to London, shifting his focus from stoneware to porcelain, and experimented with objects from teapots, bottles and jugs. De Waal has since installed over four hundred vessels at the V&A in London, created a Library of Exile that brought together two thousand books from exiled writers that now lives in London's Warburg Institute, plus exhibitions and interventions at the Frick, the Huntington, the British Museum and, meaningfully, the Musée de Camondo on the Rue de Monceau in Paris, next to where his ancestors, the Ephrussi, lived.
Many might be familiar with de Waal’s pots, but his writing is just as brilliant. From writing imagined letters to Count Moise de Camondo, to his beautiful books The White Road and Archive. This autumn, Edmund will publish two more - How to Begin, a personal meditation of creative mentorship, and a second edition of The Pot Book, a global survey of ceramic craft and design, which includes unnamed Chinese artisans from the third millennium B.C. to contemporary artists like Theaster Gates. But more importantly for this conversation, Lucie Rie, the great Viennese born, London based potter, to whom we will deep dive for the second part of this episode. And I can't wait to find out more!
THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: www.famm.com/en/ www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037
Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Tory Pope
Co-produced with Molly Lafosse
Music by Ben Wetherfield
Joan Snyder
Wednesday, June 3, 2026 • Duration 44:08
TODAY on the GWA Podcast is the esteemed painter Joan Snyder. Hailed for her large-scale gestural canvases that pulsate with colour, line and text, and are often layered with, buried in, or imploded with images of flowers, faces, or bodies, Snyder's all-encompassing works are nothing but electric. Sometimes large scale, with brushstrokes that populate the canvas like gemstones or musical scores with a whole range of keys: look at Snyder's work for a while, and it's like whole worlds emerge. Simultaneously soft but violent, beautiful yet aggressive, her works can evoke every season of emotion, just as she once wrote in her journal in 1972: "The strokes in my painting speak of my life and experiences. They are sometimes soft, they sometimes laugh, and are often violent. They bleed and cry. I speak of love and anguish, of fear, and mostly of hope."
Born in 1940, Snyder came to art not straight away, but by chance during her studies at Rutgers University, when she was studying sociology in preparation for a career in social work. But it was under the mentorship of Billy Prichard that she pivoted to art, showing just how important teachers can be. Today we meet Joan in her Brooklyn studio, where she remains one of the legendary artists of her time. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and in museum collections all over the world, Snyder, at 85 – nearly 86 – is painting more than ever and this summer, will take to Paris for her upcoming show, Earthsongs at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris, and I cannot wait to find out more.
Joan Snyder: Earthsongs opens 6 June at Thaddeus Ropac Paris https://ropac.net/exhibitions/796-joan-snyder-earthsongs/
THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: www.famm.com/en/ www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037
Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Tory Pope
Co-produced with Molly LaFosse
Music by Ben Wetherfield
Venice Biennale special: Lubaina Himid
Tuesday, May 5, 2026 • Duration 42:20
TODAY on the GWA Podcast: a very special bonus episode with Lubaina Himid, on her British Council Commission for the British Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2026, "Presenting History: Testing Translation".
Returning to the podcast for the second time, Lubaina Himid is an acclaimed Lancashire-based artist working in paintings, sculpture, installations, archives, and more, whose career spans from the 1980s – when she was established as one of the leaders and trailblazers of Britain's Black Arts movement – to the 2020s, where she uses her art and her training in theatre to create all-encompassing works that tackle silenced histories. While you can go to episode 33 to hear a deep dive into Himid's life and work, today we are focusing on her pavilion for Great Britain at the 61st Venice Biennale!
An event that happens every two years, thought of as the most important space to showcase art and artists, the Venice Biennale revolves around a central exhibition, this year curated by the late Koyo Kouoh, titled "In Minor Keys", and is often a signifier to define not just what is happening in the world, but how we can understand it through art. The rest of the Biennale is made up of pavilions – think of it like the Olympics of art, whereby countries have exhibition spaces, nominating an artist to stage a show to compete for the gold medal equivalent, The Golden Lion.
For the British Pavilion this year Himid will showcase large multi-panel paintings drenched in her signature vibrant palette. In conversation with the British Pavilion's neoclassical architecture, the installation will present Britain as welcoming and airy, brimming with potential, albeit with an underlying sense of unease as the texts, images, and soundscape (made in collaboration with artist Magda Stawarska) subtly introduce tension. And I can't wait to find out more.
Lubaina Himid's British Council Commission for the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale will run from the 9th of May to the 22nd of November, 2026, and is curated by Ese Onojeruo.
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THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: www.famm.com/en/ www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037
Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Mikaela Carmichael
Music by Ben Wetherfield
Briony Fer on Sophie Taeuber-Arp
Wednesday, April 29, 2026 • Duration 45:03
TODAY on the GWA Podcast: esteemed art historian Briony Fer on the avant-garde icon, Sophie Taeuber-Arp.
The Professor of History of Art at University College London and a Fellow of the British Academy, Briony Fer is one of the leading art historians in the world. Writing and publishing extensively on modern and contemporary art, specialising in the history of abstraction in the 20th century, Fer has curated monumental exhibitions on artists such as Anni Albers at the Tate Modern, Louise Bourgeois at the National Museum, Oslo, Eva Hesse at the Fruitmarket, Mel Bochner at Whitechapel, and more
But the reason we are speaking with Fer today is because she has also just curated an exhibition “Sophie Taeuber-Arp: The Rule of Curves” at Hauser & Wirth Paris, and published a stunning book on the great artist, dancer, performer, puppet maker, bag weaver, teacher, stained-glass maker, sculptor, architect, and so much more, Sophie Taeuber-Arp…
Born in Switzerland in 1889, Taeuber-Arp is famously associated with the Dada movement, a group of artists who formed post-devastation of World War I to make sense of a nonsensical world. Performing dance routines set to Hugo Ball poetry and turning to her geometric abstractions, full of explosions of colour, that can look equally mechanical as they are made with a human hand – as Fer writes, "diagrammatic and decorative” – Taebuer-Arp was at the forefront of modernism, conjuring new ways of working with form and colour, and exploring – and twisting – the grid, the icon of modern art, for the modern world - and I can’t wait to find out more.
The book: https://shop.hauserwirth.com/products/sophie-taeuber-arp-la-regle-des-courbes-the-rule-of-curves
THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: www.famm.com/en/ www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037
Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Mikaela Carmichael
Music by Ben Wetherfield
Deborah Levy on Gertrude Stein
Wednesday, April 22, 2026 • Duration 38:20
TODAY on The Great Women Artists podcast is the esteemed writer, Deborah Levy on avant-garde pioneer Gertrude Stein.
The author of several novels, including August Blue, Hot Milk and Swimming Home, alongside the critically acclaimed Living Autobiography trilogy (some of my favourite books of all time): Things I Don't Want to Know, The Cost of Living and Real Estate, Deborah Levy is one of the most recognisable and influential writers working today. She has been shortlisted twice each for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Booker Prize, is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has written for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
But the reason why we are speaking with Levy today is because she has just published a new novel, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, which follows a narrator who has travelled to Paris to find out more about Stein, the enigmatic, trailblazing writer and patron; a woman who bolted through the 19th to the 20th century and paved the way for modernism as we know it today, with her daring, experimental writing, from Tender Buttons to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and her patronage of artists such as Picasso, Cezanne, and Matisse – and I can’t wait to find out more.
My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein https://www.waterstones.com/book/my-year-in-paris-with-gertrude-stein/deborah-levy/2928377373535
THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: www.famm.com/en/ www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037
Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Mikaela Carmichael
Music by Ben Wetherfield
Alyce Mahon on Dorothea Tanning
Tuesday, April 14, 2026 • Duration 50:21
TODAY on the GWA Podcast, is art historian, Alyce Mahon discussing the great Surrealist, Dorothea Tanning.
Born in Illinois in 1910, where she said “nothing happened but the wallpaper”, Tanning immersed herself in gothic literature to escape to other worlds. Travelling to Paris to hunt down the Surrealists, Tanning “entered” or “birthed” herself into art in 1942 with her self-portrait “Birthday”, which sees her bare-breasted and standing in front of slightly ajar doors that seemingly lead to nowhere.
Settling in NYC, where she exhibited with Peggy Guggenheim, it was then to the wide-open landscape of Sedona Arizona, where she painted Caspar David Friedrich-like paintings of herself standing before nature – ”asserting the centrality of woman” (as Mahon wrote in her new book). She then returned to postwar France and, switching up her style, moved into a cloud-like and splintered abstractions, before turning to bodily-like soft-sculptures. Although she famously said, "don’t ask me to explain my paintings".
Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and a Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, Mahon is one of the leading scholars on Surrealism in the world today. The author of numerous books including Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938-1968 (2005), Eroticism & Art (2005), The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde (2020), Mahon has also curated or advised on exhibitions on the likes of Leonor Fini, the great Argentine-born artist known for her meticulously rendered, proto-punk renaissance-like works, who she discussed with us on episode 48, as well as the Indian-born, once Cornish-based Ithell Colquhoun.
Mahon was the curator of the monumental exhibition at Tate Modern in 2018, and now – has just published a brilliant, extensive book: Dorothea Tanning, a Surrealist world – our with Yale UP this month – that charts her life story across the places she lived in America and France and the place she imagined in her art, bringing alive her works, steeping them in history, and introducing us to Tanning’s surreal world – and I can’t wait to find out more.
Alyce's book: https://yalebooks.co.uk/book/9780300244601/dorothea-tanning/
Get 20% off Dorothea Tanning: A Surrealist World by Alyce Mahon when you purchase via the Yale University Press London website www.yalebooks.co.uk (RRP £30, offer price: £24)
Enter code ALYCE when prompted in the checkout.
UK orders only. Includes FREE UK P&P. Offer expires on 8 June 2026.
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THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: www.famm.com/en/ www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037
Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic
Music by Ben Wetherfield
Sonnet Stanfill on Elsa Schiaparelli
Tuesday, April 7, 2026 • Duration 47:39
TODAY on the GWA podcast: curator SONNET STANFILL on ELSA SCHIAPARELLI!
Sonnet is the Senior Curator of Fashion at the V&A, where she has worked since 1999. Stanfill has curated numerous highly acclaimed exhibitions, such as New York Fashion Now, Ballgowns: British Glamour since 1950, and the landmark The Glamour of Italian Fashion (2014), which traveled to several museums across the US. She has published and lectured widely on various aspects of fashion design and holds an MA in the history of dress. But the reason why we are speaking with her today is because she has just curated the monumental exhibition, Elsa Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art at the V&A, which charts the fearless life and daring work of the artist, designer, surrealist, influencer and general pioneer of who the modern woman was and what she could be. A creator of surrealist wonderlands with her fantastical gowns with floating eyes, lips, and lobsters, woven jackets embellished with astrological symbolism and mirrors inspired by Versailles, plus carrot-shaped buttons with embroidered cauliflowers, Schiaparelli – who also made jewellery and perfumes and wrote extensively – was one of the most inventive people of the 20th century. Born in Rome in 1890, she fled her conservative life for London, New York, and later Paris, where she befriended the surrealists and built a business on a scale hardly any woman had done before.
Elsa Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, V&A South Kensington https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/schiaparelli?srsltid=AfmBOormAlPprtKeObeDZhw4NDLACOBGb9Z-ApA9ZHIsKAio0A3mDHAZ
THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: www.famm.com/en/ www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037
Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Mikaela Carmichael. Music by Ben Wetherfield
The Great Women Artists, a podcast by Katy Hessel - Stats, Episodes and Rankings - My Podcast Data
