I'm so excited to say that today’s guest on the Great Women Artist Podcast is the esteemed curator, writer, broadcaster and cultural trailblazer, Ekow Eshun.

Born in North-west London in 1968, Eshun has been at the forefront of creative culture for decades.

Writing across subjects and presenting documentaries, Eshun has curated groundbreaking exhibitions. From the 2022 In the Black Fantastic, at the Hayward in London – to The Time Is Always Now, a study of the Black figure and its representation in contemporary art, that began at London’s National Portrait Gallery, and has since travelled across the US.

The author of multiple books: in 2006, he published his memoir: “Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in England and Africa” an exploration of identity and race, that sees Eshun travelling through Ghana in search of his roots.

And in 2024, The Strangers, a stunning work of creative nonfiction that tells the story of five pioneering Black men set against a vivid backdrop of art, culture, and resistance.

So for this special episode we are going to deep dive into the women writers and artists who have influenced his life and career, including Morrison, the pioneering science fiction writer, Octavia E. Butler, Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu, the Rotterdam based artist Ellen Gallagher, and photographer Liz Johnson Artur.

Because, as Eshun himself says, “The great thing about working with artists is they don’t walk a straight line or think along linear paths; they think in patterns, allowing us to approach long-established conversations from a novel perspective.”

Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006)

Hilary Mantel (1952–2022)

Wangechi Mutu (b.1972)

Ellen Gallagher (b.1965)

Liz Johnson Artur (1964)

Toni Morrison (1931–2019)

Exhibitions mentioned:

In the Black Fantastic, 2022, Hayward Gallery, London: https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/venues/hayward-gallery/past-exhibitions/in-the-black-fantastic/

The Time Is Always Now, 2024-present, touring: https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2024/the-time-is-always-now

The Clearing, space Un gallery, Tokyo, November 2025; https://www.artweektokyo.com/en/institution-gallery/space-un/

Books mentioned:

Octavia Butler - Parable of the Sower (1993) https://www.waterstones.com/book/parable-of-the-sower/octavia-e-butler/9781472263667

Octavia Butler - XenoGenesis trilogy; Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989) https://www.octaviabutler.com/xenogenesis-series

Hilary Mantel - The Wolf Hall trilogy; Wolf Hall (2009), Bring Up the Bodies (2012), and The Mirror & the Light (2020) https://www.waterstones.com/book/wolf-hall/hilary-mantel/9780008381691

Ekow Eshun - Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in England and Africa (2006): https://www.waterstones.com/book/9780141010960?sv1=affiliate&sv_campaign_id=117976&awc=3787_1761656125_d069bd054bf50de1a9bfc45991a52d17&utm_source=117976&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_campaign=Penguin+Books

Ekow Eshun - The Strangers (2024): https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-strangers/ekow-eshun/9780241990698

Herman Melville - Moby Dick (1851) https://www.waterstones.com/book/moby-dick/herman-melville/andrew-delbanco/9780142437247

Toni Morrison - Beloved (1987) https://www.waterstones.com/book/beloved/toni-morrison/9780099760115

I'm so excited to say that my guest on the Great Women Artist Podcast is one of the world's most renowned photographers working today, Sally Mann.

Hailed for her images of nature in the remote American south –  full of deeply layered memories and rivers that become characters of their own – and intimate portrayals of her children Jesse, Emmett and Virginia, Sally Mann creates photographs full of beauty. Beauty being something that is tied up with ephemerality, that is alive, that is in motion, something that we have to catch.

As she aptly wrote in her 2015 memoir, Hold Still, “there cannot be any real beauty without the indolic whiff of decay.” Mann's photographs are therefore both painterly and fleeting. They capture people on the cusp of something else, whether that be illness or an increasingly decaying body, but she also captures the land, connecting us to the ancient and the natural worlds.

Using an eight by 10 bellows camera and 19th century photographic techniques, her black and white aesthetic - that can be both dreamlike and hazy - chimes with her interest in memory and decay. Born in 1951 in Lexington, Virginia, Mann began her artistic career as a poet, but a deep dive in photography in the late 1960s whilst attending the Ansel Adams Gallery Yosemite Workshops was one of the catalysts for her photographic career. Words have always also taken center stage - she studied literature at Hollins College in Virginia in 1974 and completed an MA in creative writing the following year. She is the author of Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs and was the subject of two documentaries, Blood Ties in 1994, and What Remains in 2006.

However, this year she also released the New York Times bestselling book, Art Work: The Creative Life, a part memoir, part insight into her creative life, which is a strange and lonely one; one that is so personal and insular, and one that we can often take for granted and get angry at. Yet it was reading this that really reminded me about why so many of us do what we do…

Books mentioned:

Sally Mann - Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs: https://www.waterstones.com/book/hold-still/sally-mann/9780241699287

Sally Mann - Art Work: The Creative Life: https://www.waterstones.com/book/art-work/sally-mann/9780241774540

Artists mentioned:

Ansel Adams (1902–1984)

Edward Weston (1886–1958)

Cy Twombly (1928–2011)

Bill Brandt (1904–1983)

Robert Capa (1913–1954)

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879)

Mary Ellen Mark (1940–2015)

Joseph Szabo (b.1944)

Lady Clementina Hawarden (1822–1865)

Imogen Cunningham (1883–1976)

Artworks mentioned:

Sally Mann, The Perfect Tomato (1990): https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/10396

Sally Mann, Immediate Family series (1984–1992)

Sally Mann, Dead Duck (1988): https://observer.co.uk/culture/photography/article/sally-mann-my-quest-to-take-the-perfect-photograph-memoir

Sally Mann, Marital Trust series (1990s to the early 2000s, to be exhibited at Gagosian in 2027)

The Family of Man, a 1955 exhibition at MoMA, organised by Edward Steichen: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2429

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I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is one of the most exciting young painters working today, Eva Helene Pade.

Born in Denmark in 1997, and based in Paris – where we are recording today – Pade is known for her rich and emotionally-charged, large-scale canvases populated with figures that morph in and out of abstraction. Often set in a dreamworld that can feel akin to being lost in a dance or state of unconsciousness, with fiery blazes and dark intense shadows, Pade’s paintings exist in places beyond the realm of our world. They are full of ambiguity: as a viewer, you are unaware of whether they are in day or night, heaven or hell, if the figures are male or female, or set in an ancient world or contemporary life.

Stylistically, Pade seems to borrow from a lineage of Northern European figurative artists, from Edvard Munch to Otto Dix, creating work akin surrealism or expressionism: artistic movements born out of a time of political tumult, yet exude freedom and liberation in their subject and handling of paint. This creates an interesting conversation about the state of the world vs then, and now.

But she also goes further, imbuing her work with ancient stories and figures – such as Eve or maybe Ophelia – and stories, such as Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, a ballet she was inspired by after seeing a performance choreographed by Pina Bausch, the influential German dancer. And like Bausch, Pade was drawn to rework the story from a female lens, which served as the foundation for her first ever museum show at Arken Denmark, opening just a year after she graduated from The Danish Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen…

Today, we meet Pade in her Paris studio on a very hot day ahead of a new exhibition of paintings that opens at Thaddeaus Ropac in London in October, and I can’t wait to find out more…

Exhibition: https://ropac.net/exhibitions/764-eva-helene-pade-sgelys/

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I am so excited to say that my guest, returning for his second interview on the GWA Podcast, is the esteemed American writer, critic, and curator, Hilton Als…

A staff writer at The New Yorker for over 30 years, and a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2017 and a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing, Als is the author of numerous books. He is a teaching professor at Berkeley,

Last time Als came on the podcast, we discussed two significant artists for him, the photographer, Diane Arbus; and the painter of people, Alice Neel – the latter of whom he has curated exhibitions of, exploring her life in uptown Manhattan, and her various friendships with artists, writers, dancers, neighbours and social activists. 119

But today I meet Hilton on the occasion of a new exhibition he has curated: Postures: Jean Rhys in the Modern World at Michael Werner Gallery in London, which explores the extraordinary and complex life of Creole-British writer, Jean Rhys, born in Dominica in 1890 to plantation owners, who grew up a white person, or Creole, in a largely Black society, and moved to Britain aged 16 and lived most of her life in Europe until her death in 1979.

She was known for telling stories of women in exile, often at the whim of powerful men, and celebrated for her last and best-selling novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, published 1966, that told the life story of the so-called mad woman in the attic, Antoinette Cosway, from Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, from Cosway’s perspective.

And what a beautiful, complex, show this is. Featuring Hurvin Anderson, Celia Paul, Gwen John, Sarah Lucas, Kara Walker, and more, it is a rich portrait of a complex figure who lived between worlds, cultures, reality and fiction. And I can’t wait to find out more.

Postures: Jean Rhys in the Modern World is at Michael Werner Gallery, London, until 22 November. For more on the show: https://www.michaelwerner.com/exhibitions/postures-jean-rhys-in-the-modern-world.

Books/poems mentioned:

Good Morning, Midnight - Jean Rhys

Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys

Smile Please - Jean Rhys

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë

Self-Portrait - Celia Paul

Jean Rhys (poem) - Derek Walcott

Autobiography of My Mother - Jamaica Kincaid

A View of The Empire at Sunset - Caryl Phillips

Artists/writers mentioned:

Hurvin Anderson

Kara Walker

Eugène Atget

Eugène Leroy

Cynthia Lahti

Francis Picabia

Celia Paul

Gwen John

Augustus John

Sarah Lucas

Hans Bellmer

Caryl Phillips

Jamaica Kincaid

Derek Walcott

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It’s officially one month to go until the publication of How to Live an Artful Life, my new book that features a quote by an artist or writer for everyday of the year: https://www.waterstones.com/book/how-to-live-an-artful-life/katy-hessel/9781529155204

To celebrate, I wanted to share a teaser of the audiobook with an extract from the month of October, featuring its introduction and the first six days, so you can get a feel for the book.

Each month is based around a theme. For example, January is about seeking out ideas, February is about love, and September focuses on time.

October’s is transformation and features thoughts, reflections, creative exercises and daily routines from the likes of Virginia Woolf, Barbara Hepworth, Rose Wylie, Joan Mitchell, Marina Abramović, Zanele Muholi, Cindy Sherman, to name a few…

I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA podcast is one of the most influential artists working in the world right now, TANIA BRUGUERA!

Hailed for her installation and participatory performance works that blur the boundaries between art and reality, Bruguera has dedicated her life to making work that explores freedom of expression, immigration, totalitarianism, and human rights.

She has brought attention to the strict control of Cuban authorities by confronting visitors at Tate Modern with performer police officers on horseback, to setting up an open debate on an official-looking stage at the Havana Biennale to give people license to say what they want for one minute…

Her work – often set in the framework of the theatre – has continued to push art to its limits and grant space for important and difficult conversations to take place. As she has said:

“In a way, when you talk about politics, there is a lot of theatre involved. And what I’m trying to do with my art is how can we break the classic theatre where everything has already been decided, into a place where people can add something to the discourse”.

Born in Cuba in 1968, Bruguera was raised during the era of Fidel Castro by a diplomat and minister father in the Castro government. She moved three times – to Paris, Lebanon, and Panama – before returning to Havana, where she graduated from the Escuela de Arte San Alejandro, and would go onto complete MFAs in painting and performance in Havana and Chicago.

Since then, Bruguera has researched both the promise and failings of the Cuban Revolution, in performance pieces that allow her audience to unite and gather together and see and experience what lies behind governmental propaganda. Not only do these works speak universally, transcending time and place, but they are a great comment on the promises and failings of institutions and governments today.

The founder of the first performance studies programme in Latin America, known as the Behaviour Art School, Bruguera is also Senior Lecturer in Media & Performance, Theater, Dance & Media at Harvard University, where we are recording with her today, and, as an artist I have admired for a very young age, I really can’t wait to find out more.

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My new book, How To Live An Artful Life: https://www.waterstones.com/book/how-to-live-an-artful-life/katy-hessel/9781529155204

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I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the esteemed curator Kelli Cole to discuss the trailblazing Australian artist, Emily Kam Kngwarray!

This is a very special BONUS episode and [as a one-off format] an exhibition walkthrough of Kngwarray's show at TATE MODERN. This is the first large-scale presentation of Kngwarray’s work ever held in Europe and a celebration of her extraordinary career as one of Australia’s greatest artists.

Born in 1914, from the Alhalker Country in the Northern Territory, Kngwarray made thousands of works, reflecting her life as an Anmatyerr woman, but was – extraordinarily – only in her late 70s when she began painting in earnest, creating for ceremonial purposes and designs on the bodies of women.

Listen to us explore the exhibition: witnessing first hand some of the most dazzling paintings I’ve ever seen.

So whether you’ll listen to this ahead of your visit, or be virtually transported here (for those who can’t be here in person), I hope we can bring the magic of her paintings alive for you.

About our guest:

A Warumungu and Luritja woman from Central Australia, Kelli Cole is the Director of Curatorial & Engagement for the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Gallery of Australia project in Alice Springs.

Previously, she held the position of Curator of Special Projects in the First Nations portfolio at the National Gallery of Australia, and has contributed to numerous publications, both nationally and internationally, on various aspects of First Nations art. In 2022, she worked closely with another esteemed curator, Hetti Perkins, as part of the team for the 4th National Indigenous Art Triennial: Ceremony.

But the reason why we are speaking with Cole today is because she is the lead curator of a very exciting new exhibition here at London’s Tate Modern: Emily Kam Kngwarray!

Link to show – to see the works:

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/emily-kam-kngwarray

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I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA podcast is the renowned psychologist Lisa Wenger, who is also – very excitingly – the niece of the artist we are going to be discussing today: Meret Oppeheim!

Having collected and copied thousands of letters, notes, and documents from acquaintances of the German-Swiss artist – famed for her paintings, sculptures, collages, and more, who was commonly associated with the Surrealists – Wenger is something of a world expert on her aunt. The author and co-author of numerous books, including the award-winning “do not wrap words in poisonous letters” as well as “Meret Oppenheim - My Album” - Wenger is also responsible for updating the catalogue raisonne of her aunt, and co-running the estate, which has of late seen Oppenheim have major retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, Kunstmuseum Bern, and others that has put the trailblazing artist firmly in the spotlight.

Born in 1913 in Berlin, at the inception of the first world war, Oppenheim was raised with her maternal grandmother in Switzerland. An interest in Jung as a teenager led to her life-long fascination with dreams, informing her art practice and involvement with the surrealists, who she met in Paris after venturing there aged 18 in the 1930s. Here, she created some of her most iconic artworks, such as the fur-lined teacup and saucer which she called Object (1936), that attracts as it does repulses and still divides opinion today, and ‘my nurse’, a pair of white high-heeled shoes turned upside-down to evoke a chicken on a tray, which plays with gender stereotypes, femininity and the domestic sphere.

But, with the outbreak of the second world war, it was back to Switzerland, which proved to be a very different environment to Paris… But, never not creating, Oppenheim made dream-like paintings, sculptures, and collages that reflected her dreams, as well as a woman stifled by her lack of freedom. Over the decades, Oppenheim built up a output that would become some of the most pioneering in Europe, after all, she said: “nobody will give you freedom, you have to take it”

Today, I meet Lisa in Casa Constanza, in Carona, surrounded by Meret’s possessions and spirit - and ahead of the new exhibition at Hauser & Wirth (4 June – 19 July 2025). Let's find out more!

https://www.hauserwirth.com/hauser-wirth-exhibitions/meret-oppenheim/

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I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the esteemed American painter, Lois Dodd.

At 98-years-old, Dodd is famed for her paintings of her immediate surroundings, from landscapes to house roofs, windows and stairs. She paints the Night, day; outside, inside; doors that are painted, chipped; new, worn; and loved. While there is a seemingly absence of people, Dodd’s paintings capture whole worlds and narratives – whether it be hose fires, or laundry hanging from a washing line. It’s as though the colour, weather, light, frames, stairs, or cracks retain years worth of stories and memories, or are even characters in themselves. Steeped in American art and cultural history, referencing the likes of Hopper or Hitchcock, Dodd’s works emphasise a voyeuristic, but also familiar nature.

Born in 1927, Dodd was born and raised in New Jersey, mostly by her three older sisters after her parents’ untimely death when she was young. It was then to Cooper Union in the 1940s, where she was amongst the burgeoning New York art scene, opening the artist-run space, the Tanager Gallery in 1952, at a similar time to iconic exhibitions such as the Ninth Street Show.

Venturing to Maine, living by her artist friends Alex Katz and Jean Cohen, she took to painting views of the landscape, and by the end of the 1960s, this was now framed through a window: a perspective and device she has constantly reworked and reinvented, whether it be pressed up against her window on the Bowery, looking out onto her New York view, or of the cracked windows set in the lush, verdant countryside. Dodd allows her viewer to see something we thought we knew so well. She is an observer of nature – her works are about seeing the things that pass others by. As the critic Roberta Smith wrote in 2013: “Ms. Dodd loves the observed world. [...] She always searches out the underlying geometry but also the underlying life, and the sheer strangeness of it all.”

I would also add that she is acute at highlighting the things that others iss - take her window portraits of New York City, a favorite being one fro November 2016, of her view that although is taken p by windows, places emphasis on a golden tree or blue sky, as if to latch on to the nature that grows even in the city, and the hope and beauty that exists even in the most unexpected places…

Today we are recording in Dodd’s home/studio in New Jersey… ahead of her major exhibition at Kunstmuseum Den Haag that opens this August in The Netherlands… Being here, I feel set in a Lois Dodd painting, brought to life by the motifs that surround me – and I can’t wait to find out more.

https://www.kunstmuseum.nl/en/exhibitions/lois-dodd

https://www.alexandregallery.com/artists-work/lois-dodd#tab:slideshow;tab-1:thumbnails

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I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the esteemed American artist, Lorna Simpson.

Working across photography to painting, video to collage, Simpson is a multimedia artist who – since the 1980s – has gained widespread acclaim for her pioneering approach to conceptual photography. Whether it’s fusing text with image, obscuring her subject’s identity, using techniques such as repetition, collage or manipulation – Simpson has conjured a plethora of ways to reinvent the image, and, by doing so, raises questions about gender, race, memory, and history. Her work, mostly centred on the female body, is full of seemingly open-ended narratives – as she has said: “I think the idea of identity or persona is interesting to me in that it is malleable and fluid. And that has always been part of the work in terms of [thinking about] who gets to determine who we are. Do we get to determine that, and what are the parameters of that, given the society that we live in?”

Engaging with found images and objects, whether that be cut-outs from Ebony or Jet Magazines, or photographs she finds on eBay, which she melds with inks or collages of jewels, Simpson has continuously reconfigured what painting and photography means.

Born in 1960, and raised in Queens and Brooklyn in a childhood that put the arts first, Simpson received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and following that, an MFA from the University of California San Diego, where she began to focus on the portraits of Black women she found in magazines, adding suggestive phrases from elsewhere.

By 1990, she had a major exhibition at MoMA, and throughout the decades has continued to push boundaries with her seemingly limitless approach to materials. But in 2015, she turned to painting, showing her first nine-feet-tall canvases at the Venice Biennale, and this month will present a major exhibition – that considers the entirety of her painting practice – at the Metropolitan Museum of Art here in New York – where we are recording today.

Titled “Source Notes”, it will feature Simpson’s monumental and spellbinding paintings, which, steeped in monochromatic blues, silvers, blacks and greys, appear in settings that evoke the cosmological or natural world. An extension of her photographic work, Simpson’s paintings see the manipulated figure and body pressed into landscapes akin to waterfalls or meteorites, and I can’t wait to find out more…

https://lsimpsonstudio.com/

Lorna Simpson: Source Notes – 

https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/lorna-simpson-source-notes?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=&utm_term=lorna%20simpson%20art&utm_content=39536&mkwid=s&pcrid=743882408399&pmt=b&pkw=lorna%20simpson%20art&pdv=c&slid=&product=&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=22399716678&gbraid=0AAAAADmlGN7UtMbglt7UAR4dicGAOa9Vx&gclid=CjwKCAjw24vBBhABEiwANFG7ywIA72_JjPaxVUdfQSWW_h8NFYNWzddlSHz6KV38M9zgiG4rs_9UNxoCVFkQAvD_BwE

https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/2860-lorna-simpson/

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