The Great Women Artists

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

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

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

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

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