The most played episodes among Podcast App listeners.

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   Number 1: Tracey Emin

   Dame Tracey Emin is BACK on The GWA Podcast! Hailed for her paintings, videos, textiles, neons, writing, sculptures, installations, and now, her extraordinary work as an educator, raising the next generation of artists at TKE Studios in Margate, right by where we are recording today – Emin has been at the forefront of art for more than four decades. Born in Croydon, and raised in Margate with her twin brother Paul, Emin had a complex child- and teenagehood, which she details in her part-memoir, Strangeland – as well as in works such as Why I Never Became a Dancer or Mad Tracey From Margate. Officially leaving school aged 15, Emin went to Maidstone College of Art, and onto the Royal College – where she won over her interviewees with her impressive sketch book selection. In 1993, she kept a shop in Brick Lane, titled “The Shop”, which ended with a party on her 30th birthday, and that year had her first exhibition – at a then-new gallery called White Cube. On view were objects she had collected over the years – from teenage diaries to toys, paintings, drawings and unsent letters. She titled it My Major Retrospective, just in case she never had another show. However, this was just the start. Emin has since exhibited all over the world – most recently the Yale Center for British Art, where I saw her work a floor above JMW Turner, getting me to realise the painterly relationship between the two artists – despite working 250 years apart – from how Emin plays with moods akin to his stormy weathers, to how the bodies in her paintings evoke his mountainous landscapes, with vein-like rivers. As well as Palazzo Strozzi, highlighting Emin's relationship to the history and iconography in Italian art – such as life, death and the crucifixion, to the decay of the body and enlightenment through spiritual (and sexual) quests. It challenged the city’s history, revealing the rawness of a woman's perspective in a culture that so rarely addressed it. Now, we meet in Margate on the occasion of the largest – and perhaps the most important – exhibition in her life so far, “A Second Life” opening at Tate Modern on 27 February, in the very city where her artistic life thrived. But it’s also a show taking place after monumental personal shifts, such as her mother’s passing in 2016, surviving cancer in 2020, the opening of her free studio-based art school in 2023, but also when the world couldn’t be more excited for Emin. She has said of this show to be a “true celebration of living” and I can’t wait to find out more… -- THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: https://www.famm.com/en/ https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037 Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic Music by Ben Wetherfield

   February 25, 2026·1h 0min
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   Number 2: Venice Biennale special: Lubaina Himid

   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. –– 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

   May 05, 2026·43min
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   Number 3: Joan Snyder

   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

   June 03, 2026·45min
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   Number 4: Briony Fer on Sophie Taeuber-Arp

   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

   April 29, 2026·46min
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   Number 5: Katherine Bradford

   I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the brilliant New York based painter, Katherine Bradford. Hailed for her luminous paintings of swimming pools and cosmic skies, ballet dancers and bicycle riders, Bradford takes us to imaginary worlds full of freedom, togetherness and wonder. Not usually specifying the figures in her work, instead she offers us a universal depiction of humanity – that any of us can apply ourselves or relate to – playing with scale and perspective, and getting us to think hard about our place on this earth. Born in 1942, and raised in Connecticut, Bradford didn’t always start off as an artist. A woman of stifling 1960s America, she was married with twins in her 20s, but aged 37, swapped this life, bringing her kids along, to become an artist in New York City, and never looked back. Making her way by teaching from the 1980s to the 2010s, becoming the senior critic on the faculty of Yale School of Art and being awarded Pollock Krasner grants and Guggenheim Fellowships, Bradford – although painting for decades – has received major recognition in the past decade, such as her recent survey show at the Portland Museum of Art. And thank goodness she carried on painting, because especially at a time like this, of despair and uncertainty, we can look to Bradford’s paintings for hope, visualisations of freedom that prioritise inclusiveness and community – as she has said: “It’s important to me to make upbeat paintings. If anything, I’m making paintings about enchantment.” Looking at Bradford’s painting is like being transported into another world, whether it be outer space or in cosmic waters, it’s like they are lit with a glow akin to a blanket of stars. There is nothing artificial about them: they are spellbinding, and her canvases become a springboard for the most magical scenes, an “intentional place for imagination” as she says “as they convey a personal universe of my own making, populated with characters who explore who we are, how we fit together visually, and how we all stand next to each other.” -- THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: https://www.famm.com/en/ https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037 Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic Music by Ben Wetherfield

   April 08, 2025·39min
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