GWA Newsletter March #1
For International Women's Day we've taken over London's most iconic bookshop!
Dear Great Women Art Lovers,
It may as well be Christmas – Happy International Women’s Day!
To celebrate this momentous occasion, I couldn’t be more excited to share with you our brand new curated window display at Hatchards on Piccadilly (the most iconic bookshop in London!). Centred on all things The Story of Art without Men, this display highlights women artists, writers, authors, journalists and thinkers, and their immense contributions to the world of art, history, literature and beyond.
We’ve been in and out of the bookshop all week selecting some of our favourite titles – from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists, Marina Warner’s Forms of Enchantment, Tracey Emin’s Strangeland to Zadie Smith’s On Beauty – to display alongside artwork by Gillian Wearing, Lee Krasner, Flora Yukhnovich, and more. Here it is:
For you lucky Substackers we’ve compiled a list of all the titles included in the display so you won’t have to stare at the window for too long!
Artists: Vivian Maier, Gillian Wearing, Judy Chicago, Joan Mitchell, Deana Lawson, Tracey Emin, Marlow Moss, Louise Bourgeois, Bridget Riley, Alice Neel, Paula Modersohn Becker, Chantal Joffe, Cecily Brown, Jenny Saville, Paula Rego, Romaine Brooks, Sophie Calle, Catherine Opie, Yayoi Kusama, Barbara Hepworth, Sonia Boyce, Ruth Asawa, Frida Kahlo, Lee Miller.
Writers on artists: Celia Paul on Gwen John, Artemisia Gentileschi and Women Artists in Italy, 1500-1800, Jennifer Higgie, Linda Nochlin, Gail Levin, Marina Warner, Hettie Judah, Frances Borzello, Tina M. Campt, Olivia Laing, Whitney Chadwick.
Non-Fiction: Amia Srinivasan, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Emma Dabiri, Lamorna Ash, Maggie Nelson, Mary Beard, Patti Smith, Simone De Beauvoir, Sojourner Truth, Deborah Levy.
Fiction: Ali Smith, Alice Walker, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Siri Hustvedt, Maya Angelou, Margaret Atwood, Nora Ephron, Sylvia Plath, Ruth Ozeki, Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith.
Artists in our mini exhibition: Amy Sherald, Alice Neel, Deborah Roberts, Flora Yukhnovich, Gillian Wearing, Guerrilla Girls, Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner, María Berrío, Mickalene Thomas, Shirin Neshat.
Scroll to the bottom for some more close-ups/ BTS shots. A huge thanks to Hatchards’s wonderful window designer, Clare Rose. She has such vision! I want to live here.
In other news, this week’s column for the Guardian is on how Alice Neel shatters the taboos around motherhood and allows women to feel seen. After centuries of immaculate Madonnas, and idealised portrayals of motherhood in art, Neel presents the complex truth about bearing and bringing up children – and inspired generations of successors. This came out of a fascinating conversation at the Barbican last week with artists Chantal Joffe and Christina Kimeze. Read it here.
We had a very nice feature in YOU Magazine, discussing the book. Read it here. If you want to hear more, come and join us this Sunday 12th March at 12pm when I’ll be discussing my book with the author, Kate Mosse for this year’s WOW Festival at the Southbank Centre! Tickets here.
Yesterday we released another post to our paid Substackers, as part of our new “Artist Spotlight” series, this time highlighting the brilliant and little-known Janet Sobel. Read it here. Sobel worked slightly earlier than the widely celebrated Abstract Expressionists in the 1940s, but has since come to be recognised as one of the movement’s pioneers. She features in the Whitechapel Gallery’s Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-70. Subscribe!
That’s all from me — enjoy the day. Onto 5 of your top 5s.
Katy. Xoxo
5 Shows in Britain
Daisy Parris at Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate (until 16 April)
Louise Giovanelli at Moon Grove, Manchester (until 16 April)
Lubaina Himid at Cristea Roberts, London (opens 10 Mar, until 22 April)
Lynda Benglis at Thomas Dane, London (until 29 April)
Ravelle Pillay at Chisenhale, London (until 23 April)
5 Shows Overseas
Lee Lozano at Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin (until 23 July)
‘Muse or Maestra? Women in the Italian Art World, 1400-1800’ at Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (until 4 June)
Shigeko Kubota, Cecilia Sandoval, Mary Lucier and Charlotte Warren-Huey at The Kitchen, New York (until April 29)
Wangechi Mutu at the New Museum, New York (until 4 June)
Zineb Sedira at Hamburger Banhof, Berlin (until 30 July)
5 Artists Discovered
Barney’s photographs give us an insight into suburban American – a world populated by golf courses, art galleries, Fourth of July beach parties and elaborate Thanksgivings. Check out her early photographs at Kasmin in NYC.
Although still trailblazing today, Haworth is known as a leading figure in the 1960s British Pop Art scene. More recently, she has collaborated with her daughter, Liberty to create a large mural featuring 130 portraits of women who have significantly impacted British culture. The work will be displayed for the first time when the National Portrait Gallery reopens in June. (I cannot wait!)
Saar creates prints, sculptures and installations which respond to a wide range spiritual traditions. She is particularly interested in African diasporas and uses found materials – nails, glass, shards of pottery – to create sculptures informed by her daily life, but which are also imbued with a sacred presence.
Through shards of colour and semi-abstract shapes, Ito’s paintings capture that acute moment of when the sun sets or rises. She paints an imagined destination – a refuge – and once said: “Every time I have a problem, I go deeper and deeper into painting … I have no place to take myself except painting.”
Bath paints cropped, blurred portraits of hands and faces, which conceal more than they reveal. Despite the photographic closeness, key details seem to be missing and beg for distance. This provokes questions around who it is we are looking at, whose hands are clasping whose, and what relationship we are truly viewing.
5 Things to Listen to
Marina Abramović on Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso (don’t miss Ethan Hawke, Lena Dunham, Hilton Als, and so many more… I’m obsessed!)
Therapy Works with the amazing Julia Samuel (my favourite episodes are with Helena Bonham Carter and Minnie Driver)
Tracey Emin on This Cultural Life (it’s so good when she talks about Egon Schiele’s influence on David Bowie, with his covers referencing his paintings!)
Otegha Uwagba on Sentimental Garbage
Yoko Ono’s Meltdown playlist by the Southbank
5 Things to Do in London
9 March: Curator tour of ‘Antigone: Women in Fibre Art’ with Wells Fray-Smith at Richard Saltoun
9 March: ‘Making Sense of Abstraction‘ artist talk with Flora Yukhnovich and Michaela Yearwood-Dan chaired by Ferren Gipson at Whitechapel
11 March: Rianna Jade Parker on Black Artists in Britain Now at Tate Britain
18 March: Curator tour of Magdalena Abakanowicz at Tate Modern
22 March: Curator talk on Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun at the Wallace Collection
Check out these extra shots! Our window display is up until early May, don’t miss it. A closer look:
Setting up yesterday:
Clare putting the finishing touches together last night!
Don’t miss our wonderful window display on the other side of St James’s — at Waterstones Piccadilly on Jermyn Street:
That’s it from us! Happy GWA’ing. Thank you for reading this Substack. To receive additional content, and support this page, sign up to be a paid subscriber:
If you think someone else might enjoy this too, please spread the word and share this article. If you have any feedback, please comment below. See you next time! This newsletter is by Katy Hessel + Viva Ruggi.
This was a breath of fresh air! I love your newsletter! :)
Thanks, this is the best newsletter so far. Hatchards must provide you with an office at the very least, if not a whole flat.