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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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)

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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.

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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!

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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/9781631496769

Charleston Trust: https://www.charleston.org.uk/?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjw99e4BhDiARIsAISE7P857bJ_t36EZCN2JGBsJDUlVSxga42Bmq66SzIuCslkje6DXQsi94AaAmYZEALw_wcB

Mrs Dalloway's Party: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/oct/05/discovered-a-lost-possible-inspiration-for-virginia-woolfs-mrs-dalloway

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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

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THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:

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Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic

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