Raw and Radical Women in the Arts Podcast | Conversations with extraordinary women in the arts

Curator and art historian Nathalie Herschdorfer shares with us her wisdom and thoughts on the body and body-image, the influence of photography on the self-conception of the body, including its importance in the emergence of social media.

Nathalie Herschdorfer talks about her journey of becoming an art historian, the experiences that have raised her awareness of the gender disparity in the art world, what this means for the industry, and for her research on the body and body-image. She speaks about several kinds of deconstruction and reflects on how the evolving photography practices have impacted these processes. Finally, she gives insightful thoughts on her book “Body” and the ‘feminist prism’, sculpting the landscape of art photography nowadays and how it has come to change through the emergence of social media. Nathalie closes the conversation with final reflections on the importance of women’s experience – as women – as they relate to their art.

Conversation Highlights

• When it becomes clear that countless women were erased from Art History
• The challenge for women to make a living through art
• Nathalie’s book Body and the “feminist prism”

In this episode, Laia Abril discusses the origins of her career, her methodology, the themes she explores in her work, often related to women, such as rape and abortion. She also shares her insights from creating art out of polarizing issues, and being a woman in the art world.

Laia Abril traces back to what led her to study journalism, then end up doing art photography through a need to communicate about certain stories. She discusses the myriad ways in which to express a story, and the roadblocks she’s faced during her career in attempting to shed light on certain difficult stories and realities. Laia tells us how her work has naturally veered towards a central theme: being a woman. Moreover, she explores with us what this means in the art world, discusses the roles of our institutions and the paradoxical fact that these very creative institutions are sometimes averse to work that depicts themes that still create unease: abortion, rape. She shares with us the intricacies of her art and the challenges of working with subjects on such delicate issues.

Conversation Highlights

• Laia’s methodology and the need to tell certain stories
• Womanhood in Laia’s work and in the art world
• Laia’s latest project: History of misogyny

Violaine Lochu tells us about her fascination with voice, which led to her art, and how this materializes in her performances and installations. She also talks about her thoughts on being a woman in her field, her work process, and all the forms her art can take.

Violaine Lochu shares her fascination on voice and how she uses it for her art, a transdisciplinary practice which takes its roots in encounters with humans and non-humans and voice recordings. She talks about her process, her discipline and emotional connection to her art, her views on being a woman artist, and speaks about her upcoming exhibition at the Galerie Analix Forever: MblaHah.

Conversation Highlights

• How Violaine uses voice in her art
• The role of improvisation, and an improvised performance night
• Being a woman in the arts for Violaine
• Violaine’s upcoming exhibition at Galerie Analix Forever: MblaHah

Olivia Fahmy tells us about her background as an art historian in relation to her curatorial work, the co-founding and running of the independent art space Tunnel Tunnel, and the question of heritage, particularly attached to her recent curation of African contemporary art.

Show summary

Olivia Fahmy begins by tracing back to her roots: how she developed an interest in art history which propelled her to current career, explaining that she initially didn’t have encouraged exposure to the art world. She goes on elaborating on the question of heritage and legitimacy, having Egyptian parents. She co-founded an independent art space, Tunnel Tunnel, and talks about the experience of this collective and what they strive to achieve through their projects, with a highlight on diversity and multiplicity. She speaks about the relation between curatorial work and societal changes, being a woman in her field of work, the reshaping of education, discrepancies in matters of equality and identity, the panel discussions on photography she has created, and women photographers. She mentions artists such as Sim chin Yin, Leobang Thlako and Sabine Weiss. Finally, Olivia ends off with a word of advice for artists to fight against inequality and to be empowered.

Conversation Highlights

• Origins, heritage, legitimacy
• Tunnel Tunnel and how curating exhibitions contributes to changes in society
• Intersectionality, identity and diaspora art

Nadine Wietlishbach talks about her career as a curator and her philosophy in relation to exhibitions and art, and insights on being a woman in her environment.

Nadine Wietlishbach has an unusual background for her career as a curator and museum director: she has no formal education or background in arts history. But her immense curiosity and interest for visual arts in all its mediums has propelled her to her current standing. In this episode we discuss the catalyst of her interest in visual arts, where she draws inspiration from, her approach and vision on exhibition creation and the space that surrounds it, the reality of contemporary photography being a medium of exclusion, and her punk attitude coasting through her career.

Conversation Highlights

• Nadine’s background and inspiration
• The art of making exhibitions
• Photography: a medium of exclusion
• On Institutions’ social responsibilities & the punk attitude

Founder of the Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA), Aldeide Delgado comes in to talk about her organization, the ongoing research project that unveiled the work of past generations of women artists/photographers in Cuba, leading to a career defined by her contributions to photography, empowering women and gender equality through establishing meaningful connections and threads across multiple organizations, eventually redefining art history.

Show Summary

Aldeide Delgado has been on a mission to uncover lost art and artists, particularly women photographers, particularly in Cuba, where she started out. She founded the Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA). While studying art history she noticed a gap in the curriculum that had failed to notice women in the history of Cuban Photography before the 90s. This has led to her ongoing research that aims to uncover some of this lost art and forgotten women photographers. This in turn led to the creation of WOPHA – Women Photographers International Archive, a rising non profit, and the first edition of a free international congress that gathers artists and numerous organizations with similar interests. She discusses the challenges of the research, the “Fast Forward Manifesto”, and the highlights of the Congress.

Conversation Highlights

• Redefining art history by unveiling lost photography of women in Cuba and its challenges
• WOPHA and the first Congress
• The Fast Forward Manifesto

Celebrated and award-winning contemporary photographer Jessica Backhaus is here to talk about her artistic journey from being a child brought up around Art, to her photography studies, mentorship with Gisèle Freund, first assignments, and her current work as one of the most highly regarded contemporary photographers in Germany. She shares valuable insights and meditations on her career and being a woman in her field of work.

Show Summary

Jessica Backhaus has had a long career. So in this packed double-episode, we untangle the several aspects of Jessica’s life, roots, career, and passion.

In Part 1, she talks about her childhood and novice experiences as a photographer: from being a student in Paris, to getting under the mentorship of iconic Gisèle Freund, her first professional assignments, moving to New York, and being a woman in a field of work that held strong stigma against women at the time Jessica started working.

In Part 2, coming soon after, we will delve deeper into Jessica’s work, how she’s evolved along with her style, and the serendipitous accidents that led to her most recent installation.

Conversation Highlights Part 1:

• Jessica’s upbringing: art, freedom and opportunities to explore and develop her passion
• Gisèle Freund, Jessica’s mentor
• A woman’s meditations and insights on over 20 years of a career in photography

This podcast is supported by Pro Helvetia the Swiss arts council, the Republic and Canton of Geneva and the City of Lany in Switzerland. 

Celebrated and award-winning contemporary photographer Jessica Backhaus is on the show as the first guest of the season to talk about her artistic journey from being a child brought up around Art, to her photography studies, mentorship with Gisele Freund, first assignments, and her current work as one of the most highly regarded contemporary photographers in Germany. She shares valuable insights and meditations on her career and being a woman in her field of work.

Show Summary

Jessica Backhaus has had a long career. So in this packed double-episode, we untangle the several aspects of Jessica’s life, roots, career, and passion.

In Part 1, she talks about her childhood and novice experiences as a photographer: from being a student in Paris, to getting under the mentorship of iconic Gisèle Freund, her first professional assignments, moving to New York, and being a woman in a field of work that held strong stigma against women at the time Jessica started working.

In Part 2, we will delve deeper into Jessica’s work, how she’s evolved along with her style, and the serendipitous accidents that led to her most recent installation.

Conversation Highlights

Part 2:

• From the first project to the first publishing representation
• The process of creation, beautiful accidents and “Cut Outs”

This podcast is supported by Pro Helvetia the Swiss arts council, the Republic and Canton of Geneva and the City of Lany in Switzerland.

Dana Hoey, a San Fransisco born artist and photographer based in upstate New York, talks about her photography and video work which investigates gender roles, archetypes, aggression, and power in society.

For the last episode of the season, we welcome Dana Hoey, an American artist that captures videos and photographs, and blends fact and fiction to question society’s preconceived ideas of gender, relations between each other, masculinity, and femininity. Avid in her practice of combat sports, she integrates that into her work as well and uses it in the directions she gives her models.

She also talks to us about her thoughts on being a woman in the arts as well as her philosophy on motherhood and how it impacted her career.

Conversation Highlights

• The use of combat sports in her work
• Exploring gender roles and identity
• In for freedom and being a woman/mother in the art world

Lyz Parayzo, a Brazilian-born artist currently studying in the Beaux-Arts de Paris talks about her art, inspired by her personal experiences, and which focuses on the body, gender identity, and fluidity.

Lyz Parayzo, a Brazilian artist who works sculptures, live performances and audiovisual pieces, is with us on the show recorded from the gallery Espace L in Geneva, where there’s an exhibition called “PornoChic”. It was inspired by one of the tale of the book of the “Erotic Tales” by the Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst.

In this episode, we talk about the feminine performative, gender, its fluidity and its place in the art world that sometimes remains conservative. Through her work, like sharply cut sculptures representing ‘jewelry as self defense’, she aims to create the aforementioned debate, raising questions on desire and violence and its relation to the feminine performative.

She shares how her personal experiences have heavily influenced her art, along with external inspiration through writers, artists and thinkers such as Lygia Clark, Hilda Hilst, Hudinilson Junior, Kubra Khademi, Paul Preciado and Annie Sprinkle.

Her work is provocative, and affronting to some. Some of it has once been censored. But her art, as her body - which she draws from for her creations - takes a political stance, as the LGBT community still suffers from hate crimes, phobia and rejection.

Conversation Highlights:

• Lyz’ “Guerilla Plans”: claiming art spaces for her art
• Her series: “Bellic Prosthesis”, sculptures of ‘jewelries for self-defense’
• Desire and violence, gender and identity

Calling herself a ‘visual narrator’, ‘intimate outsider’, and ‘subjective documentarist’, Mimiko Türkkan comes on the show to talk about her visual video project on water, in relation to fear, her creative process and social identity.

Our unique guest in this episode is Turkish artist Mimiko Türkkan. She creates artwork such as photography series, books and videos with a focus on gender roles and socially constructed identities.

She shares with us her artistic process in coming up with ideas, forming a narrative and going through a project. We focus particularly on her most recent creative endeavour, resulting in “Energy Watery Incantations” in the Galerie Analix Forever in Geneva, to which we get to listen to an excerpt.

She investigates her fears, in relation to ‘the flow’, her creative process and her relation to the world. With traveling and physical activity playing a major role in her artistic process, she gives us a glimpse into the making of “Energy Watery Incantations.” She also gives her piece about being a woman in the arts and gender equality in Turkey.

We also welcome Barbara Polla, owner of the Galerie Analix Forever, adding to the subject of the show ‘Water Paintings’, having had the opportunity to follow Mimiko throughout her creation.

Conversation Highlights:

• Mimiko’s artistic process where traveling and physical activity have an important place
• “Energy Watery Incantations”, her relation with fear and the flow.
• Her thoughts on female identity, gender equality, and being a woman in the arts in Turkey

Spanish curator, art historian, writer and currently the director of the Art Gender Nature Institute at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel, Chus Martinez talks about reimagining the exhibition public space, the transformative role of art in society and being a woman in her field of work.

It’s a pleasure to welcome Chus Martinez to the show and to listen to her enriching thoughts, opinions, and experiences as a woman in the very pit of the artworld. She talks about how she reimagines and innovates the exhibition space as a curator, art’s powerful impact in driving social change, and being a woman in the art world.

We also discuss the mindset of artists working collaboratively versus this false idea of “the genius”, the experience of being immersed in the art education world, and the gradual coming back of man into cohabitation with nature.

Conversation Highlights:

• Reimagining how to organize exhibitions
• The impact of art on society
• The gradual reconnection of man with nature
• Chus’s experience being in the world of art education
• Being a woman, and also a mother in the art world
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Photojournalist, and then litigator turned one of the most celebrated photographers of the female nude of our time, Renée Jacobs talks about her career transformation, the visual representation of women in society and being a queer woman in her field of work.

I’m happy to receive Renée Jacobs on today’s episode. She explains her career choices and transitions, details on her “PARIS” and “POLAROIDS” book, insights and anecdotes on the pressure of being a woman, especially queer, photographer of the female nude.

We also highlight the importance of authenticity in the depiction of female sensuality, and of accurately shaping our own image (as women). In her words, “women can’t be heard if we can’t be seen.”

Conversation Highlights:

• Her transition from photojournalism to law to photography of the female nude
• The visual representation of women in our society, particularly of the erotic woman
• Her books “PARIS” and “POLAROIDS”, and the “PHOTOS DE FEMME” organization

Radical feminist artist, video artist, and Italian-Swiss performer Angela Mazullo talks about artistic alter egos, motherhood, and third wave feminism

Today I’m delighted to welcome Angela Mazulla to the show to talk about her artistic alter ego, how she has combined motherhood and art, and a unique oral history project she has nurtured over the past several years titled, “The Archives of Radical Feminism.”

Today’s podcast is unique in that it was originally conducted in French, and the interview is overlaid with an English translation.

Key points of the conversation:

• Her artistic alter ego
• Being a mother and an artist
• The Archives of Radical Feminism

Her artistic alter ego

Angela was born to an Italian father and a Swiss mother and grew up in a small village near Zurich, where there was a great deal of liberal thought and conversations about progressive political movements. This shaped a great deal of her early thinking and influenced the direction of her artistic exploration later.

After she moved to Geneva for art school, she created an alter ego for her art performances named “Makita.” She says this allowed her to have more freedom to experiment with more sensitive and provocative subjects in her performances than if she’d performed under her own legal name.

Angela says that “Makita” is a role that she plays that lends more power and depth to her performances, but because it is an alter ego, she doesn’t have to inhabit that role all the time, which makes it possible for her to be more courageous and provocative in her performances.

Being a mother and an artist

Angela says that she always wanted to be a mother, but unlike many women, deliberately chose to get pregnant with her children while she was also in school. At the time, this was a radical, defiant act because many women either hid their pregnancies or dropped out of school.

However, not only did she have two daughters, she also found ways to include them in her work, ultimately creating a project called “Homeschool,” which features her daughters reenacting portions of critical texts to highlight the childishness of certain critical actions.

The Archives of Radical Feminism

For the last five years, Angela has been working on an oral history project of feminism, which includes both recording conversations among contemporary women about critical topics, and transcribing an audio archive of 1970s radical feminist Italian consciousness-raising sessions.

These conversations and transcriptions raise the questions of how feminism has evolved over the last several decades. It also cemented Angela’s position that feminism is a movement best done by groups of women.

She says that as a performer, she is a lone activist. But once she began working with small groups of women, she realized how feminism is a moment of many and that it is a collective vibration.

Brigitte Renaud shares the inspiration behind Pièces d’été, her contemporary art festival, and the similarity between engineering and art

Today I’m excited to welcome Brigitte Renaud, who is the founder of Pièces d’été (Summer Piece), a free outdoor contemporary art festival that takes place every four years in the village of Mabuisson. The art pieces are staged along a 5-kilometer path that meanders between the village, forest, and the shores of Lake Saint-Point, allowing visitors to wander between them and experience each piece in a different setting.

The Guerilla Girls share their take on sexism, racism, and corruption in the art world, and how they fight back with “creative complaining”

It was a great honor to welcome two of the Guerrilla Girls, “Frida Kahlo” and “Käthe Kollwitz,” to this episode of the Raw and Radical Women in the Arts podcast.

The Guerilla Girls group is made up of anonymous feminist activist artists, who wear gorilla masks and adopt the names of famous women artists as pseudonyms so that public attention remains on the work they do, rather than on their identities.

Beginning of the Guerrilla Girls

The group formed in 1985, after a 1984 MOMA exhibition included just 13 women and 8 artists of color in their line up of 169 artists.

“We realised … we had to do something, and a bunch of women, not us, called a protest,” says Käthe. “It had no effect at all. And we understood at that moment that people thought the art world was a meritocracy … where the gatekeepers, the powers that be, always picked the best. So if you weren’t in a museum, you sucked, you weren’t any good, and that was our ‘ah ha’ moment. We realized there had to be a better way to tell people about this issue, a way that broke through their preconceived notions:

Since then, the Guerrilla Girls have engaged in what they call “creative complaining,” to raise awareness and catalyze change. Their new book, Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly, documents the hundreds of projects they have done over the last 35 years to expose sexism, racism, and corruptions.

“Our idea from the beginning was to create a new kind of political art using strategies of persuasion, like advertising,” says Käthe. “We do books, we do videos, we do huge billboards, but it’s all based on that kind of graphic execution and we started out doing street posters and bringing our work directly to people.”

The founders of “FATart” talk about inspiration, intersectionality, and why women artists should charge more.

I’m very pleased to welcome Ursina Gabriela Roesch and Mark Damon Harvey to the Raw and Radical podcast. Ursina and Mark are the co-founders of The Femme Artist Table (FATart), which is Swiss organization devoted to elevating women artists’ presence, voice, visibility, attention, and acceptance within the art world.

The inspiration behind FATart

“The Femme Artist Table project came from this experience that I am a woman in the art business and I don’t have the same opportunities that men have,” Ursina says.

She wanted the project to be inclusionary—a place where women could come together, sit at the same table, and talk about art and the business of art—which inspired the name Femme Artist Table and naturally led to the slogan.

For Mark, who was already involved in a number of cultural and racial movements, the concept of FATart was a given.

“For me, in the sense of intersectionality and cultural integration, it was obvious to me that it would be a good idea to do something like FAT because it was just logical. It was illogical for me that it didn’t exist already,” he says. “It’s not about just being radical or contrary… it was something that was an obvious step toward the future that was missing.”

Ursina and Mark launched the nonprofit FATart Fair in 2018, which featured 55 independent women artists in its first year, and has doubled in size since.

Women getting FAT

One of the biggest changes they see for participants is a willingness to put themselves out there more and charge more, and many women have gone on to start galleries or create new projects.

“We should talk more about money… because a lot of women are in this kind of ‘making everything for everyone for nothing,’” Ursina says. “It’s a question of consciousness. A question of aims. A question of ‘how I see being an artist as a professional.’”

Mark agrees, but also sees it as endemic to society and the roles women have traditionally been regulated to.

“Women have been in general saddled with the idea of care work,” he says. “They’re responsible for taking care of so many things without being paid, and I think that’s also one of the reasons why they’re not used to being paid correctly when they do something that men are doing too.”

The two have found that those traditional roles bleed over into other aspects of professionalism too.

“Ursina was really pushing artists to talk to each other about their work and not about their kids or their living situations and things like that,” Mark says. “It’s interesting that that is a real, necessary shift of perspective for women artists, that when they get together they really talk about their work.”

Art historian Marta Ponsa shares her perspective on the value of online art exhibitions and the evolution of women’s representation in the art world.

Today’s Raw and Radical podcast features an interview with Marta Ponsa, who is an art historian and is currently a curator for Jeu de Paume and oversees their Artistic Projects and Cultural Activities department.

Marta has a particular interest in photography and visual art. Early in her academic career, she studied 17th century religious etchings and iconography made, as she says, “to teach, and to convert, and to manipulate people” in North and South America.

This focus naturally transitioned to photography and contemporary art later on.

“The transfer to photograph was in a way natural for me … I am interested in the power of images … and who are the creators and the context of the creation ... how are they spread,” she says. “Users and abusers—that is the core of my career and my interest.”

Engaging Online Art Audiences

Now, as the head of the Artistic Projects and Cultural Activities department, Marta spends a great deal of time finding ways to engage different audiences in the online exhibits that she curates.

“How can we bring other audiences to our place? How can we open doors ... open windows to get audiences involved and to attend projects?” she says.

These online exhibits have been particularly successful during the pandemic lockdowns. Even though the museum itself has been shut down, she has been able to continue working with various artists and audiences to offer new art and new perspectives to audiences.

“We had a lot of visitors to these spaces … going through the spaces,” Marta says. “It was our way to share, to still be alive.”

Representation for Women in the Art World

Marta also shares her thoughts on the progression of women having equal representation in the arts, and how there is still a lot of progress to be made. Despite the fact that numerically speaking, more women are represented in the arts, in society, and in politics, she says the real issue goes deeper than that.

“We are not talking about just representation, we are talking about real action and power and also I think a different way to manage and to see the world,” Marta says.

But from her perspective, part of the problem is that women are having to invent their own ways of building self confidence and promoting themselves.

“We don’t have many of these models in the social panorama,” Marta says. “So the work is harder… We have to find our own ways of creating ourselves. The challenge is bigger but open new perspectives maybe be less hierarchical and more transversal and collective.”

She goes on to encourage women to continue working toward these changes. “I think we can, and we should. As I say we should keep on and pay attention and look around and think… because to make changes is always complicated but it is exciting.”

Raquel van Haver, Colombian-born painter and photographer, shares her inspirations, quest into the meaning of identity, and perspective on being a female artist

I am so pleased to welcome Raquel van Haver, a Colombian-born painter and photographer who lives and works in Amsterdam. I discovered her work at the ARTCO Gallery in Berlin, and immediately fell in love with her large-scale paintings.

Raquel’s pieces are particularly captivating because she draws on a collection of source material she has gathered from all around the world, including West Africa and South America. These pieces frequently show gatherings of people, where multiple bodies come together in one space.

“I always have a big fascination when it comes to groups, group pressure, the identity of the group,” Raquel says. “And it’s interesting to see, like, when you look at a group there’s always one who is the leader, there’s one who is taking care. There’s a pattern… and I love to portray them. When they mingle, it’s actually almost like a dance.”

Anne-Claire Bisch, the general director of the Geneva Free Ports and Warehouses Limited, shares a glimpse into the world of storing and securing high-value art.

I am so glad to welcome Anne-Claire Bisch to the show today. She has a fascinating background as an art historian, an art insurance expert, author, and a lawyer. She founded Artssurance in 2014, which is an insurance company specializing in artwork and valuable objects, and recently became the general director for the Geneva Free Ports and Warehouses Limited.

Geneva Freeport is the oldest and largest freeport facility in Geneva, Switzerland, and is sometimes called the biggest museum in the world.

“The Geneva Freeport... it’s a very special place in the art business,” says Anne-Claire. “Behind the door there are some people, and there are some very high value objects... Some artworks, some articles, some contemporary pieces, but also some wines. Many people forget that we have approximately three millions of bottles of wine.”

Theatre director and filmmaker Véronique Caye shares the inspiration and concepts behind her mesmerizing film and performance work

I am excited to welcome theatre director and filmmaker Véronique Caye to the Raw and Radical Women on the Arts podcast today. She’s here to talk about the inspiration behind her work and the radical concept of being a “pirate” woman.

Véronique develops hybrid and experimental performances by experimenting with digital technology, and especially focuses on heightening and exploring the tension between the video, the actor, and the audience.

Thematic inspiration behind her work

“I explore the video multiplicity… that’s the staging of the image, visual set design, video documentaries, installation, and augmented reality. And also illusion and teaching,” she says. “So it’s a lot, but with these different forms I try to develop a dramaturgy of the image where the sensitive and poetic dominate the medium.”

Véronique credits a lot of her artistic inspiration to travel and the work of a number of poets.

“These readings and these trips all around the world put me on the path of what I call my epiphany. So, say a certain kind of philosophy of existential eroticism,” she says. “...to me it’s a philosophy of wondering, desire, of poetry, and a way of annotating every moment of life.”

“Sleeping Beauty”

But Véronique also explores the concepts of freedom and what it means to shake free of societal expectations. It was a central theme in her 2008 performance, “Sleeping Beauty,” which

featured a video showing different movie scenes of women fainting, or falling asleep. During the performance, women were invited to come sleep on the stage while the film montage played behind them. Their sleeping "performances" offered a striking contrast to the passive "fairy tale" sleep shown in the films.

“When you see the bodies sleeping for real in front of you, it's not… anymore, it’s not the sleeping beauty,” Véronique says. “It’s: I did what I want. I went to sleep during the time I should work… Those scenes are really important.”

“The Pirate Woman”

As part of pushing back against expectations, she has developed a concept she calls “the pirate woman,” a role model who is independent and rebellious, but who also feels that living with joy and respect for all human life is important.

“For me the pirate woman is a new woman. She’s a pagan and a mystic, ruled by one belief, her own,” Véronique says. “I can say it’s me, but it can be also you.”

The philosophy of the pirate woman is a dedication to “lifting the veil” and exploring what lies underneath our surface thoughts and our perception of reality.

“Lift the veil and then we see the reality,”  Véronique says, “and then we can start to be connected to others and to be connected to ourselves.”

AWARE co-founder Camille Morineau talks about representation, the value of women’s artwork, and fixing the historical records

I am delighted to welcome Camille Morineau to the podcast to talk about her work on researching women artists, her non-profit research organization, and how women artists and others can fix the gender imbalance in the art world and in society.

Camille first became aware of how few women artists are shown in galleries and in art shows as she was preparing for a show at the Musée National d’Art Moderne. As she was walking through the galleries and reviewing the museum’s collections, she realized that barely 10 percent of the artwork shown was from women.

In response, she proposed a show focused solely on women artists from the museum’s collections, which became a huge success. The exhibition was called elles@centrepompidou. Although it was initially scheduled to run for two months, it ultimately lasted for two years and drew 2.5 million visitors.

After the show closed, Morineau wanted to continue researching and promoting women artists, and ultimately co-founded a non-profit, Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions (AWARE) to continue her work.

Ali Kazma, Turkish video artist, talks about the significance of human labor and our inherent potential for transformation in his new exhibition, “Women at Work.”

Today I’m pleased to introduce Ali Kazma, a Turkish video artist who explores the meaning and significance behind human activity and labor. He just had a beautiful new solo exhibition, “Women at Work,” at the Galerie Analix Forever in Geneva.

Kazma has been creating short videos that explore the process and skill behind various professions since 1998, as part of an effort to survey and document the neighborhood he lives in. As part of an early exhibition, titled “Today,” he explored the process of shooting video on location in the morning, such as at a clock maker’s studio or in a butcher’s shop, and releasing the edited video in the evening, projecting the video through the gallery window for people on the street to watch.

“As I was doing it and through my survey of my district I understood that a lot of the activities we as humans do are to keep the order around us from dissolving,” he says. “The world left on its own is all about going from order to disorder. A lot of the things we do are about upkeeping, maintenance, or adding some kind of order—new forms into the world we inhabit.”

Dr. Sarah Thornton, a writer and sociologist of art, talks about what makes an artist an artist, their role in society, and their need to be active agents of their own career.

I’m very pleased to be interviewing Dr. Sarah Thornton on the show today. Sarah has written extensively about the art world and art market for many publications, including The Economist. She has also written three critically acclaimed books, each of which dives deeply into issues of authenticity, believability and cultural value.

In her book 33 Artists in 3 Acts, one of the research questions was: what is an artist? “The great thing about being an artist is that it is self-defined,” she explained to me, “but it’s self-defined within reason. So, not anybody can just say ‘I’m an artist’ and have credibility and the social role and status of an artist.”

The issue of artistic credibility, she says, hinges on the fact that being an artist is not just a job, but an identity. So artists have to prove their worth in the eyes of the public, collectors, and museum curators.

Asma Naeem, Chief Curator for the Baltimore Museum of Art, discusses women and gender fluidity representation in the BMA 2020 Vision initiative.

Today I am very excited to welcome Dr. Asma Naeem to the On Display podcast. Naeem is an art historian and is currently the Chief Curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art. She brings a unique lens and motivation to her work, curating art pieces and installations that directly address issues of social justice, under-representation, and inequity.

The Baltimore Museum of Art recently made headlines for their 2020 Vision initiative, timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote in the United States.

Commemorating women and gender fluidity in the arts

Naeem says that while discussing how to commemorate the occasion, the question really became how to recognize the event while also being provocative about social justice issues and representation.

“We decided that the best way to discuss the trajectory that women have made in the past 100 years was to devote an entire year of exhibitions to women artists or artists who identify as women, as well as to focus our acquisitions on works that were made by women,” Naeem says.

The decision to include women artists and artists who identify as women has generated a great deal of discussion.

While some responses to the decision and the initiative itself were predictably adverse—questioning the need to have a focus on women or to be inclusive of transgender women artists—overall the comments have been robustly positive and have even questioned whether the museum has gone far enough to make a real, lasting difference.

Artist and sexpert Maïa Mazaurette shares her perspective on appreciating the male body and challenging popular culture’s “sex machinery”

Today I am excited to welcome Maïa Mazaurette, who is a sexpert, writer, columnist, keynote speaker, painter, and illustrator, and is challenging gender roles and sex norms through her writing and artwork.

Maïa has been researching the role of sex in artwork for over 15 years, and regularly shares her sex expertise and knowledge through the columns she writes for GQ France magazine and several newspapers. As an artist and painter, she focuses on the male body, in part to challenge what she terms the “sex machinery” of the world’s dominant sexual culture.

Celebrating and appreciating male bodies

Maïa began drawing and painting men after repeatedly asking other women to do the same, but receiving no response.

“Two years ago I decided that I could not keep asking people to do something that I wouldn’t want to make happen myself,” she says. “And I started to look for models and I started to work… and I started to realize that some things were more complicated than I imagined.”

Among those challenges, she says, has been figuring out how to pose her models in a way that is masculine, but not imposing or aggressive.

“What is masculine? What is beautiful for a man?” she asks. “We are used to seeing them as sexy human beings only when they’re doing something because you have the idea that women are passive and men are active.”

“If you want to have one man alone in a picture, and … he’s not applying his power on a human being or an object, then you suddenly have a man who is displaying some kind of female quality and then it’s not sexy anymore and it doesn’t work,” she says.

Finding her way around this problem has led Maïa to experiment with different poses, developing an entirely new “language of position” that translates her models’ sexiness and beauty to the canvas.

Continuing the sexual revolution

Maïa sees her work as a way to continue and even radically change the direction of the sexual revolution that began in the 1960s. That change should include making it possible to appreciate regular male bodies in our everyday lives, and with more frequency.

“As women, we don’t have a lot of occasions to look at men for three hours at a time. Usually we mostly see men who are dressed up and also in museums and also on tv,” she says, adding that 75 percent of the museum artwork we see is female-centric.

Focusing on men in her work changes that dynamic, giving women an opportunity to stare at beautifully rendered male bodies for as long as they wish.

She also wants to help people create a new language around sex, one that finds a middle ground between the somewhat vulgar language and the prim, reproductive-focused language from earlier eras.

Her hope is that her work—both written and artistic—will encourage people consider the myriad of sexual possibilities that are open to them, and have happier sex lives as a result.

“We see that every single piece of the sex machinery is being challenged at the moment,” she says. “It is great sometimes to be puzzled, to be lost, because then we can write a different sex map… My wish is not to say what exactly is the sex utopia. I just want to explain what is mine so that people can disagree and make their own.”

Artist Viktoria Binschtok shares her artistic process and thoughts on how we communicate through images in a digital age.

Photographer and conceptual artist Viktoria Binschtok joins us today to talk about her artistic inspirations and process, her experience participating in an artist-run gallery, and the impact of family life on her work.

Viktoria studied Photography and Media Arts at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, ultimately earning a Meisterschüler Studium. As a student, she found herself drawn to imagery in our society, how it is used to communicate, and how it changes with cultural evolution.

This exploration became the basis of her creative process. She starts with one of her original images, uploading it to the internet and using a search algorithm to find other visually or thematically similar images. She often recreates these found images in her own studio, adding unexpected elements or color, before combining all the images into collections or “clusters.”

“I just get the idea, and then I go back into my studio and I restage these found images, and then I combine my image and the found image,” she says. “You don’t really have a story behind one certain image, it’s more about visual data … it’s an abstraction on this visual culture.”

Dr. Barbara Polla shares her views on women’s rights, feminism, and the important questions women should ask themselves

Dr. Barbara Polla, a medical doctor, researcher, politician, mother, writer, poet, and gallery owner, joins us today to talk about how her career has evolved, her opinions on feminism, and how women can step into their power.

Early on in her career, she attained a medical degree with a specialization in inner medicine, pneumology and immunoallergology, following that up with a number of research positions, including the Harvard Medical School and the French Institute of Health and Medical Research in Paris.  In 1991, Dr. Polla started her own gallery to represent contemporary artists, often collaborating with other gallery owners to bring fresh, unconventional art shows to the public. She also taught on the relationship between art and fashion at the Institut Français de la Mode in Paris and the HEAD (Haute Ecole d'art et de Design) in Geneva.

The progression of a multifaceted career

She attributes her ability to manage such a diverse number of careers to her energy and passion for discovering new things.

“I think what drives me is the desire,” she says. “I think that, rather than jumping from one career to another, it’s actually like reading a book … I never quit what I was doing … because I was bored with it, but just because the next page seemed more exciting, more desirable.”

Nevertheless, there were many intense years where she was filled multiple roles at the same time.

“In the forties, that was I think the most intense and most difficult time. There was nothing in my career that I could say—okay, let’s postpone this for five years,” she says.

Artist Marta Zgierska shares the process of creating intimate, vulnerable artwork based on her own personal experiences

Joining us today is Marta Zgierska, a Polish artist exploring the idea of beauty, intimacy, and the feminine body through her photography work. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Photography, in addition to Masters of Art degrees in Theatrology and Journalism.

Her artwork is inspired by her personal experiences, emotions, and feelings. Her breakthrough series, Post, was based on her experiences after a serious car accident and the resulting physical and mental trauma it caused.

Frédéric Elkaim, a contemporary art expert and artist coach, shares his perspective on women achieving equity in the arts and why their work is so radical.

Today’s podcast features special guest Frédéric Elkaim, a contemporary art expert and consultant, lecturer, artist coach, author, and the founder of Art Now!, a platform dedicated to connecting contemporary artists and art collectors. Elkaim is also an advocate for recognizing and elevating women artists as critical contributors to the artistic world.

One of his most recent efforts involved putting together a five-part lecture series on important women artists throughout history, in coordination with Yasmine Lavizzari, director of the galerie Air Project.

“We wanted… really to go further than what ‘artistry’ is today,” he says, “To underline who are those women artists and why they are so important in the evolution of art from modern art, impressionism, etcetera, to what we can see nowadays.”

Musician Adriana Balic shares the most important mindset and self-care lessons she learned while on tour with P!NK’s Beautiful Trauma World Tour.

Musician Adriana Balic joins us today to talk about what she learned about self-care while on tour with P!NK in her Beautiful Trauma World Tour, her core philosophy when it comes to being a creative, happy person, and the surprising turns her journey as an artist has taken.

Adriana toured with P!NK previously in 2003, but left in 2008 when she became pregnant so she could be present for her son's formative years. Then, in 2017, circumstances aligned for her to return to working with P!NK.

“This experience of being out on the road as a mother, a wife, and having been at home for nine years previous to that, it was such a different experience,” she says. “It has done a lot of things for me personally, one—given me the space to focus on me again.”

Part of what’s challenging about self-care, she says, is making a mindset shift. While on tour, her job was to get up on stage at the end of the day and give her all during the performance. But in order to support that effort at the end of the day, she had to lay the foundation at the beginning of the day—starting with sleep, getting enough exercise, drinking a lot of water, and scheduling downtime.

“Knowing that doing nothing is actually doing something… it’s taken me a long time to get to that place to acknowledge that it’s important,” she says.

Today we welcome special guest Catherine Orer, Business and PR strategist for artists, and founder of The Artist Entrepreneur, which offers resources, training, and community for artists who want to build sustainable businesses and careers. In her role as a coach for artists, she has unique insight to offer into common mindset issues that hold artists back and what skills artists should learn to succeed in their entrepreneurial efforts.

Catherine initially worked in marketing and PR in the corporate world, but eventually decided to switch her focus to art instead. She studied at Christie’s Education in Paris, and then worked in galleries to gain experience—planning to eventually open her own. But after artists started asking her for advice on their marketing and selling efforts, she realized she had a special set of skills to offer. 

“I realized how much I loved connecting with artists... and that… all of this experience that I had over my career, I could really put it to use and help people,” she says. “It just all came 

About our guest: 

Catherine Orer, an award-winning Business & PR Strategist and founder of The Artist Entrepreneur, counsels professional visual artists and creative entrepreneurs who want to build sustainable businesses and careers. She holds a degree in Communications and Public Relations from the University of Québec in Montréal, and completed her education in the business of art at the prestigious auction house, Christie’s, in Paris.together.”

Oil painter and photographer Chris Aerfeldt joins us to talk about her artistic journey, her sources of inspiration, and finding the self confidence to keep creating even when experiencing self-doubt. Chris focuses on themes of freedom, authenticity, invisibility, and peer pressure. Women figure prominently in her work as larger than life characters, often placed in environments that are seemingly at odds with their activities. 

Chris shares how her subject matter is influenced her experience working in the fashion design industry, by older Dutch paintings of women engaged in household chores, and her own background as the daughter of two Estonian refugees. As a result of their experience in refugee camps, her mother was very restrictive, and Chris’s childhood left very little room for self-expression. 

“When I was growing up, I felt invisible and squashed,” she says. “Now when I’m painting my women, I want to be seen, I want to feel strong… My paintings are all very large and the women are all larger, much larger than lifesize. So they’re giants, because I feel like… I don’t want you to ignore my women, my women have to be seen.”

From making art to being an artist

Chris started out by doodling in her notebooks at school, often landscapes or other nature scenes that offered a mental escape from her home life. Later, she graduated to making oil paintings on scraps of cardboard in the family garage, but she never considered being an “artist” a viable career choice. Instead, she got a degree in art education. 

But after trying and rejecting a number of career paths, she found herself increasingly frustrated and depressed. With the encouragement of her partner, she enrolled in art school.

Working through doubt to self confidence

Despite having made art and working toward being an artist all her life, she still struggles with not overthinking her process and being too self critical. She says that she has to shut out the rest of her imagined audience when she’s working in order to create from an authentic and vulnerable place. 

“I think all of us have our self doubts, it’s trying not to let that self doubt rule what we do and rule our lives, because the self doubt can be so overwhelming,” Chris says.

About our guest: 

As a nervous and hypersensitive eleven year old, Aerfeldt escaped to her father’s shed and started making oil paintings on scraps of cardboard as a way to be seen and heard, and to calm herself. In 2007, Aerfeldt was awarded the Samstag Scholarship, enabling her to travel to London and complete her Masters in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art. Many of her pieces have been purchased by renowned collectors, including Charles Saatchi, and she has exhibited in the UK, France, Spain and Australia.

Today the Raw and Radical “On Display” podcast welcomes Angela Fraleigh, an oil painter and installation artist, to discuss the role of feminism and power dynamics in her work, her thoughts on manifesting our own realities, and her interest in uncovering hidden feminist-focused histories. Angela’s work was described by one museum curator as creating “utopic provocations of … counter or oppositional narratives that allow us to imagine different pasts and different futures.” One way she creates these narratives is with large scale paintings that immerse the viewer in her “feminine utopian” vision.

“We’re forced to see intricacies of body language at that kind of scale,” she says. “I’ve elevated these figures … so that they kind of loom over us in a much more kind of powerful way.

The idea that our realities are created from our thoughts is a powerful influence on Angela’s work. She sees the current political climate and events as a manifestation of our underlying thoughts, but also as a powerful opportunity for purging and change, particularly as it relates to her art. “Rather than focusing on the stuff I don’t want, I’m focusing on what I do want. And what I do want are these big utopian feminist societies that are much more nurturing and, not maternal, but … where people feel comfortable and safe to create the world they want to live in,” she says.

Angela is currently focused on the invisible histories of women in the arts. Her recent exhibition at the Edward Hopper House Museum focused on the role of his wife “Jo,” an accomplished painter in her own right but who was ultimately eclipsed by her husband. “What I found interesting is ... she was posing for all these paintings but they were never of ‘her,’ they were always a stand in for a woman,” she says. “So ... this notion of her kind of being seen through, even when she’s being stared at ... I wanted to play with that idea and how that relates to contemporary concerns for women and women artists of today.” Angela also touches on how parenthood has impacted her art practice. She says she’s very lucky that she can afford daycare and that both her mother and her partner are supportive and open to sharing the childcare load, but it still requires pre-planning to the time to create art. “I’ve learned to be really efficient with my time. I don’t overthink things as much because there’s just no time to do that… which is a blessing” she says.

Angela’s advice is that leaning into and supporting one another is incredibly important. She feels that without doing that, we can’t reshape our thought processes and society into a more nurturing environment for our creativity.  “I think that the patriarchal structure that we’ve all kind of been seduced by throughout our lives... [there’s] this sense that [it’s] like a ladder that you can climb and that you won’t really be happy until you get to whichever rung you’re at,” she says. “And then you’ll look around and then you’ll want more, and that’s okay! That’s great! But it’s the waiting to be happy part that’s not okay.”

About our guest: Fraleigh was born in Beaufort, SC, and raised in rural New York. She received her BFA in painting from Boston University and her MFA in painting from the Yale University School of Art, then spent two years in Houston as a Core Artist in Residence. Fraleigh is a professor and the department chairperson of the Moravian College art department. She is represented by Inman Gallery in Houston, TX. 

Hip hop artist and writer Toni Blackman talks about living without regrets, overcoming fear, and connecting with others through music, meditation, and rhyme.

Today’s podcast features Toni Blackman, who shares some highlights from her career, lessons she’s learned, and how fear, self-confidence, and living without regrets has shaped her life choices and artistic path. She jumps right in by talking about fear, a major obstacle to overcome for any artist, and how it has shown up in her life and music. “This whole belief that you're supposed to be fearless, that stops a lot of people. But there’s a lot that we can get done and complete while fear is still here,” she says. Overcoming that fear, and living her life without regret, is one of Toni’s strongest motivators. As a freshman in college she heard a speaker talking about how no one wants turn 50 years old, and wonder what would be different had they taken “what if” chances throughout their lives. “It resonated with me so deeply that so much of what I do comes from, ‘I’m going to do this ‘cause part of me wants to do it, and instead of overthinking myself out of doing it, I’m just going to do it,’” she says.

About our guest:  Toni Blackman, a highly respected artist and social entrepreneur, is the first Hip Hop artist selected to work as a Cultural Ambassador with the US Department of State. This visionary artist leads freestyle masterclasses, rap cyphers, has developed innovative approaches to using the cypher as a concept for community building, leadership development, and healing, and is on the working committee for Harry Belafonte’s Sankofa.org. She is also the creator of Freestyle Union Cypher Workshop and Rhyme Like A Girl, for which she was awarded a prestigious Open Society Institute fellowship.

Barcelona-based artist and painter Eva Armisén discusses her inspirations, the impact of motherhood on a creative career, and new artistic collaborations.

Today the Raw and Radical podcast welcomes Eva Armisén. Eva is an artist and painter who lives and works in Barcelona, lending her talents to a variety of endeavors, including painting, illustration work, public art installations, advertising, television, film production, and editorial projects.

Eva derives her inspiration from everyday life and mundane situations, trying to capture those small moments of joy and convey those stories and emotions though her work. As a result, her art has a playful, energetic quality that conveys happiness and optimism.

“Most of the things that move me happen in daily life or with the people I have around. So that‘s maybe the reason that.. a lot of my paintings are representing, like... that area of life,” she says. “Sometimes family, sometimes the countryside I have around my studio. But they all talk about emotions.”

About our guest:

Eva Armisén focuses on capturing daily life and everydayness as something extraordinary, offering an exuberant, optimistic look at the world through her work. She earned her Fine Arts degree from the University of Barcelona, before entering the Rietveld Akademie in Amsterdam for further training and study. Although primarily a painter and engraver, she collaborates on a wide variety of projects, most recently the book “Mom is a Haenyeo,” about the diving women of Jeju.

Delphine Diallo, Brooklyn-based French and Senegalese artist, discusses “feminine energy,” its influence on her art, and why it’s relevant to our lives today. 

Show Summary: 

In this episode of Raw and Radical, Mauren welcomes Delphine Diallo, who worked in the music industry as a special effects artist, video editor, and graphic designer for several years before moving to New York in 2008 to start a career as an independent artist. 

Delphine is particularly drawn to women as subjects, exploring how they relate to and express their feminine vitality and force through her portraiture and collage work. She first became aware of her own feminine energy a decade ago, as it manifested in a strong urge to create artwork. She quickly realized, however, that she couldn’t maintain her creative flow and needed to connect with her feminine force on a deeper level to consistently create meaningful work.

About our guest: 

Delphine Diallo is a Brooklyn-based French and Senegalese visual artist and photographer, focused on exploring women’s relationships with their innate, transformative feminine power. She graduated from the Académie Charpentier School of Visual Art in Paris, working in the music industry for several years before moving to New York and launching her career as a solo artist. Through her provocative visuals, Diallo seeks to combine artistry with activism, empowering women, youth, and cultural minorities