Legendary Female Artists on the Younger Women Who Inspire Them
40 legendary female artists — and the younger women who remind them why they make art.
For most of civilization (and even now), the question was never what women could do — it was what we were allowed to do. Make art, live alone, have children, don’t have children: A woman’s choices are often circumscribed by the era in which she is born, and then again by how tolerant, encouraging or generous the men in her life — beginning with her father — are. Poor women’s lives are circumscribed further; women marginalized because of their race, sexuality or ability, further still.
I suspect many women, in America and around the world, feel they’re in a state of whiplash as they’ve witnessed hard-won freedoms and rights become imperiled in recent years. I always say that history is not a line but a loop, and it’s been dismaying and frightening for many to watch as we tumble down the other side of the curve. Yet if being a woman means always looking backward — to remind us of where we were, what we must avoid and how our predecessors managed in their own difficult circumstances — it means looking forward, too, as part of the ongoing exercise of hope that is also intrinsic to womanhood.
For this issue, we asked 33 mid- and late-career female artists and creative people (the majority of them over 45) to identify a younger female artist who inspires them. It didn’t have to be someone from the same field or discipline; it didn’t even have to be someone they knew — it just had to be someone who gave them a sense of hope, and in whom they saw either their younger selves or, in some cases, the self they wish they had been. Many of these older artists faced overt sexism or discrimination (when she began her career in the 1960s, the 83-year-old writer Margaret Atwood was told, “Well, of course women can’t write”); their very presence, not to mention their accomplishments, is a testament to their perseverance — an undercelebrated but necessary quality in an artist’s life. I was struck as well by how many of these artists’ younger counterparts see the lives of those who picked them as models of self-possession and assuredness, even as the older artists themselves claim this wasn’t the case: “What I think we all saw in Margaret was confidence,” says the 34-year-old comedian Atsuko Okatsuka of the 54-year-old actress and comedian Margaret Cho. “I often wonder what it must feel like for her, knowing who she is since she was born.” But “if I go back and look at my comedy sets from the ’90s, my voice was all over the place,” Cho says (in a separate interview). “[Atsuko] has a strong sense of self that took me a long time to develop.”
Many of these women speak lovingly and movingly of the importance of mentorship — “Mentorship’s not a candy store; it’s a relationship,” says the 72-year-old playwright and actress Anna Deavere Smith — which, it’s worth clarifying, is not the same as mothering. But we also talked to seven artistic mother-and-daughter groups, ones defined both by blood and, in the case of the writer and illustrator Sybil Lamb, 47, and the writer Imogen Binnie, 44, by kinship: trans women who found inspiration, comfort and understanding through each other’s work.
Artists, all artists, never stop searching for ways to live and ways to be, for lessons from other people’s lives — “Oh,” you think, “if I had her bravery, if I had her tenacity, if I had her industriousness, if I had her lack of self-consciousness, then who might I become? What might I be able to create?” History is a loop, and time is short. We’ll find instruction from whatever source we can, whether looking back or looking forward. The march goes on. — Hanya Yanagihara
The Artist’s Mind
What it feels like for female artists to wrestle with ambition, ego, ambivalence and inheritance.
How does an artist keep making art? First, by turning to herself for inspiration. Being an artist can be an isolating pursuit, usually done with an audience in mind but with no guarantee of that audience materializing. It demands the ability to spend a lot of time in one’s own head, even when collaborating with others, to entertain doubts — which can foster creativity, too — without inviting them to stay. That isolation has, historically, been especially true for women artists, some of the most celebrated of whom have seen “writer” or “painter” or “filmmaker” treated as a secondary part of their identity.
What bolsters many of these artists is other artists: their support, and their lives’ example. Progress is lost, progress is made — personally, artistically, politically — but that connection remains. For this issue, we asked legendary female artists to tell us about a younger woman whose work excites them and gives them hope. Some of these women had never met in person before they were photographed together but had admired each other from afar. A few are mothers and daughters, sharing their own form of artistic communion. We also asked several writers to reflect on states of mind that are both intrinsic to an artist and imposed upon her by the culture.
What became clear throughout is that inheritance is more of an exchange: An older artist has much to impart, but she also learns new things, including about her own art, from those who follow her. That’s the most exciting thing about artistic legacies; they’re far more fluid than one might think. The artist will sometimes feel lonely. But she is never alone.
Inheritance
By Emily Lordi
Since women have long been expected to nurture male artists (as muses, wives and mothers), but not to succeed them, artistic inheritance can seem like an exclusionary system in which creative capital is transmitted from men to men. Still, there are advantages to being cut out of the patrimony. When no one expects you to write the next great American novel, or to direct the next great Japanese film, you are free — indeed, impelled — to create something else. As the Black poet Lucille Clifton, who published her first collection in 1969, wrote in her 1993 poem “Won’t You Celebrate With Me”:
... i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up ...
Clifton did, in truth, have female precedents — she could look to Emily Dickinson for her crystalline form; to Gwendolyn Brooks for her Modernist experimentation. She could even seek guidance from her own mother, a “magic woman,” in Clifton’s telling, who was affected by epilepsy and died at age 44, when Clifton was 22, but whose messages her daughter continued to access, first through a Ouija board, then by channeling her voice in writing. But Clifton’s self-mythologizing poem expresses a deeper truth about women’s need to draw inspiration from their own lives as much as from pre-existing art, especially when their available models simplify or exclude their experiences.
The Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros, 68, was driven to become a writer before there were stories of Mexican American immigrant life for her to read, never mind emulate. There were the Latin American Boom authors of the 1960s and ’70s (mostly men), and the poets Cisneros studied at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop (mostly white). She ultimately needed to follow Toni Morrison’s now-famous dictum and write the novel she wished to read. In 1984, she published “The House on Mango Street,” a series of prose-poem vignettes about Mexican American life in Chicago, its unorthodox form befitting its then-radical content.
Women’s use of autobiographical source material has produced its own bind: the misconception that their work is social reportage or self-expression, not art. Some women have tried to dodge this (for example, the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante, by hiding her identity altogether). Others have aestheticized autobiography itself by framing the women in their families, or their broader cultures, as unacknowledged artists — whether because of their craft work, as seen in pottery or weaving, or their love of language. Paying homage to these influences allows women to make a subtle feminist gesture on the level of form, rather than an explicit feminist statement.
But for the current generation of women artists, who have come of age with models who more closely resemble them, identity seems more like a source of community than a trap. To write from personal experience in 2023 might mean depicting a bilingual Chicana childhood in Chicago; but it will also mean engaging with Cisneros as a predecessor, and perhaps even privileging an audience that’s already familiar with her work.
“The benefit is undeniable,” says the poet and scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs about the legacy of her Black women forebears, including Morrison and Clifton. Gumbs, 40, who leads workshops on Black feminists like Audre Lorde and has published poetry collections inspired by theorists such as Hortense Spillers (“Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity,” 2016), sees herself as a beneficiary of the intergenerational network of honest Black talk and compassionate mothering — including creative instruction — that Clifton describes in her 1985 essay “We Are the Grapevine.” Clifton died at 73 in 2010, 51 years to the day after her mother. Yet sometimes, when Gumbs is writing, she can feel the elder poet — who, she says, “was so specific about ‘How does this look on the page?’” — telling her, “You don’t need that, or that or that.” Gumbs deletes the words, having learned from Clifton’s example not only how to write but how to listen.
Women artists, born into a Babylon of exclusion and possibility, reveal that creative inheritance is as promiscuous as legal inheritance is strict. We inherit a work of art, including the artfulness of someone else’s way of being, when it transforms us. I never met Morrison or Clifton, yet I have carried their words and ideas around in my head for some 20 years thanks to the teachers who introduced them to me. My professors were worldly, wry, stylish and kind, and I imagined that, by embracing their favorite writers, I might become like them. The best I could do, it turned out, was share what they had shared through my own writing and teaching. But that’s as it should be. Education, like any creative inheritance, is a gift bestowed indiscriminately and claimed most fully by those who pass it down the vine.
Ambition
By Yiyun Li
One of my most favorite pieces of literary correspondence is a 1973 letter from Rebecca West to the editor of the Times Literary Supplement, responding to a front-page review of a book about her work, an article that also functioned as an overview of her career. “One must feel some discomfort in the fact that an appreciation of so considerable a talent as Dame Rebecca’s should start, inevitably, with the problems arising from her sex,” claims the review’s author, who goes on to give this verdict on an early West novel: that it is, essentially, “merely a woman’s novel.” Another example of “woman’s novels” given in the same paragraph? “Mrs. Dalloway.”
West, 81 then but as feisty as ever, wrote a letter protesting being “treated as a witch.” (The letter deserves to be read and reread in its entirety.) My favorite line: “I am too good for the world of modern literature, and the way I come off so badly is that I know that I am not good enough for my world.” A delightful and defiant statement, which I often use as a parameter when I write: “Am I good enough, not for the critics or the readers but for myself?”
I once explained to an interviewer that there were two kinds of ambition: public ambition and private ambition. The former is the desire to be successful according to the worldly terms — sales, awards, prestige. (Very few writers, one supposes, are immune to this desire.) And then there is the private ambition, which neither asks nor receives confirmation from the world. This is the desire to be able to say, after scrutinizing a page of one’s own work, “This is as good as it gets; it’s good enough to be read by Tolstoy or Chekhov or Rebecca West.”
It turns out I made a mistake putting ambition and private together. Ambition’s etymology, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, comes partly from the Latin ambition-, ambitio, “soliciting of votes, canvassing, striving after popularity, desire for advancement, ostentation, pomp”; ambit-, “past participial stem of ambire, to go round or about.” Sharing this etymology are two other words: “ambient” and “ambience.”
So ambition has little to do with the intrinsic values of an artist’s work. An artist, if ambitious, must canvas like a politician: striving, soliciting and winning popularity; seeking (and demanding, appropriately in the case of West) external acknowledgment and approval. Some artists are good at cultivating art, others at cultivating ambition, and those who are ambidextrous deserve all our respect.
I make a distinction between art and ambition without any slight intended to anyone. We no longer live in the age of Montaigne, when one could stay in a tower and write for oneself. Some years ago, a celebrated author from Britain admonished me that one must not stop touring, giving Iris Murdoch’s career as a cautionary tale: Murdoch’s sales, according to this writer, slumped after she stopped touring. And these days, ambition’s demand goes beyond physical presence. An author with whom I sat at a recent signing emphasized, when she learned that I do not use social media for marketing and publicity, the importance of maintaining a constant presence on social media, which, if we think about it, is a perfect setting for the symbiotic relationship between ambience and ambition: There is no solitary ambience, just as there is no solitary ambition.
Art is insatiably demanding, and so is ambition. They’re not partners in a comfortable and easy relationship: Sometimes they work together, but more often they compete against — even undermine — each other. Much can be said about the artist caught as the third point of this fraught triangle, but perhaps nothing surprising. Stories of success are like stories of happy families, all alike, though most artists, one supposes, live in less happy stories.
I’m aware that when I borrow West’s line for my writing, I’ve edited her words. West did not say “good enough for myself” but “good enough for my world.” I wish I could ask her who else would be found in her world — certainly, the Times Literary Supplement was not.
A few years ago, a friend gave me a notebook as a present, and on the front page was a collage, a plush theater kept mostly empty but for a handful of audience members, including Chekhov, Turgenev, Elizabeth Bowen, Marianne Moore, Stefan Zweig, William Trevor, John McGahern and a few others. So that, I can say, is truly my ambition — not just good enough for myself but good enough for those in my theater.
Ambivalence
By Ruth Ozeki
Ambivalence: a forked-tongued, two-headed demon who has dogged me since I first dared dream of becoming a writer. When I was a little half-Japanese kid and wanted to write a great American novel, ambivalence whispered in my ear that Asian girls didn’t write big books and that I should stick to haiku. When I tried to write haiku, ambivalence reminded me that I wanted to write novels. When I tried to write a novel, ambivalence had strong opinions about what I should — and should not — write about. Now, four novels and many decades later, ambivalence still haunts me. Every time I think about starting a new book, the two heads of my old nemesis rouse themselves, rub their faces and flick their tongues. “Great, let’s go!” one mouth exclaims, while the other groans, “Oh, please, not this again!”
The word “ambivalence” comes from a German neologism, ambivalenz, coined by Eugen Bleuler, a Swiss psychiatrist and a contemporary of Freud’s. It combines the prefix “ambi-,” meaning “both,” and the root “valentia,” meaning “strength,” and denotes the ability to see the strength in the opposing sides of an issue. This etymology makes ambivalence seem positively empowering, but is it? Bleuler also coined the word “schizophrenia,” which means “a splitting of the mind.” Ambivalence, too, is a bifurcation, a splitting of feelings or beliefs, and many writers, particularly women writers, feel pulled in different directions. Ambivalence offers women many hats to wear in addition to that of writer: wage earner, wife, mother, daughter, caretaker, accountant, housekeeper, cook. ... The list goes on. Women generally score lower than men on tests designed to measure self-confidence, particularly in early adulthood, and with so many conflicting roles to play, is it any wonder? If we second-guess ourselves, perhaps it’s because our female ambivalence has grown into a stronger monster.
And here I have to make a somewhat ambivalent case in defense of my demon, by acknowledging her daemonic qualities. Ambivalence is not only an enemy — she could never be just one thing — but often acts as an ally and an inspiration. Every book I’ve written has grown from the seeds of uncertainty that ambivalence has sowed. By positing the opposite, the red to my green, or the blue to my orange, she opens up the vast prismatic spectrum in between. This is my demon’s genius, to force me to recognize and consider the rich and subtle array of ideas, feelings, beliefs, reactions and choices that are possible in any situation. Of course, this can be confusing, too. Ambivalence has a contrarian’s eye for possibilities. When I say “black,” she says “white.” When I say “this,” she suggests “that ... and how about these, and all those others?” Confronted with so many alternatives, it’s easy to succumb to self-doubt and inertia but, when I get stuck, rather than sitting back smugly and taking a break, my ambivalence goads me back into action.
All this to-ing and fro-ing makes ambivalence a somewhat old-fashioned and inefficient monster, not well suited to life in a fast-moving world where beliefs must be expressed in certainties, and thoughts compressed into 280 Unicode glyphs. Where opinions must be monovalent, and minds must be made up. Where flip-flopping is seen as an executive weakness, and uncertainty spells political death.
Conversely, ambivalence offers us the opportunity to weigh choices, consider alternatives, ponder possibilities and even change our minds. This mulling slows us down, but is that necessarily a bad thing? When it comes to writing fiction, slow is often good — or at least better — and so I try to practice patience. But patience, for writers, poses yet another challenge. There’s an oft-quoted saying that writers don’t want to write; we want to have written. When I start a novel, I want to know what it is going to be, but writing requires the ability to tolerate not knowing, often for years at a time. The Romantic poet John Keats called this “negative capability,” which he defined as the capacity “of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts.”
And this is the discomfiting gray area that my ambivalence likes best. It’s the shrouded, unsettling place from which literature emerges, the in-between space of generative tension, where the most nuanced fictional characters live, and where their stories are born. I don’t have to love this state of tension or hate it. I don’t have to love or hate my ambivalence, either — to do so would be to squander her power. I just have to tolerate her uncertainties, mysteries and doubts long enough to transfer them to the page.
Ego
By Ayana Mathis
When asked on a 2019 radio program about her status as someone ahead of her time, the artist Carrie Mae Weems told the interviewer: “I say this ... not out of ego but out of real clarity of understanding — the work is larger than me. Not that I’m just interested in my own celebrity or my own fame but, rather, I’m deeply interested in the field, in expanding the field and what the field can be.” Weems is a titan in that field, known for her outspokenness and brilliance; nonetheless, she understands herself as part of a larger whole from which she benefits and to which she contributes.
In contrast, I recently came across an article about the photographer Arne Svenson, whose series “The Neighbors,” first shown in 2013, caused a stir because the images were taken, and exhibited, without the knowledge or consent of his subjects (one family sued him). “A lot of artists, and I think it’s a gift,” Svenson has said, “are completely oblivious to the consequences of their actions.” I was struck by each artist’s orientation toward their work — and its relationship to others. It isn’t a comparison of male and female egos that interests me but how the female artist navigates expectations about her ego, her sense of herself as an artist and how that might affect the face she presents to the world.
Everyone imagines artists’ egos as massive and destructive, rather like a three-story-high Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon, broken loose from its handlers and menacing the crowds below. And towering egos certainly aren’t gender exclusive. The determination to splash one’s innards across a canvas or over the page or stage requires a foundational conviction that you’ve got something to say that other people ought to hear. The “I” is full of itself. This isn’t limited to artists; all of us are possessed of an I, an ego, that defines itself over and against the other selves it encounters. This ego makes decisions and translates the depths of our innermost selves into sensations and ideas that are intelligible to others. Because art involves making meaning through aesthetics, the ego’s function as manager and translator is essential to the artist. And for the female artist, the manager-ego is further tasked with balancing her I with sexist limitations imposed upon her confidence, her awareness of herself, her stature and how she expresses those things publicly.
Permit me a digression: Remember Sasha Fierce, Beyoncé’s aughts-era alter ego? Sasha was sexy, bold and utterly unafraid. Beyoncé created Sasha to counteract her own onstage shyness, so the legend goes. How about Tina Snow and Hot Girl Meg, Megan Thee Stallion’s alter egos? Or brash, dirty-talking pioneer Lil’ Kim and her Queen Bee back in the ’90s? These alternates make for good show business, but they’re also a container for attributes and audacities that may not fit — or perhaps are not permitted to fit — within the performer’s regular persona.
Alternates are a place to process doubts and insecurity by overpowering them with a larger-than-life superwoman. As any artist can tell you, doubt can cripple. The artist must diminish its power if she wants to succeed. But doubt is also a motivator: It spurs the artist to try harder, to be riskier, to regard her creations with skepticism, which pushes her toward greater exploration and innovation.
Of course, the invention of alter egos isn’t limited to women. Ziggy Stardust sprang from David Bowie’s starry mind. But significantly, while Ziggy was supplementary to his male creator, the female alter ego often exists in contrast to its maker — a host for what the artist cannot be, or a part of herself or her performance she fears the public won’t accept. It’s no coincidence that Lil’ Kim’s Queen Bee has been hailed as an early herald of Black feminism in hip-hop, rapping about sexuality and financial autonomy with the same bravado as her male counterparts.
I don’t mean to suggest that the female artist requires an alter ego. But there’s some valuable modeling there in terms of circumventing expectations and broadening the scope of what’s possible — a metaphorical, integrated alter ego, if you will, that moves the artist toward Weems’s clear sense of herself and where she stands. After all, Beyoncé killed off Sasha Fierce over a decade ago because, she said, she didn’t need her anymore. Now she’s just Beyoncé, which seems to be going pretty well.
Mothers & Daughters
The unique support system of a creative family — biological or otherwise.
How a ‘Succession’ Actress’s Daughters Joined the Family Business
Geraldine and Irene Neuwirth Are Still Learning From Each Other's Craft
The Artist Who Helped Imogen Binnie Develop Her Own Creative Identity
How Lynn Nottage and Her Daughter Are Exploring Their Relationship in Writing
What Laura Dern and Diane Ladd Have Learned From Each Other
Jamie Nares’s Message to Her Daughters Was Simple: ‘Go for It’
Laurie Simmons and Lena Dunham Argue About Earrings, Not Art
In Tribute
Five visual artists make portraits for T of the late, great women who’ve inspired them.
Interviews by Evan Moffitt
Sometimes, a young artist turns to the past for their greatest inspiration. T asked five emerging and midcareer female artists to make a portrait in any medium of a deceased woman artist who has influenced their work. The results present a range of styles and inspirations, from Juliana Huxtable’s surreal painting of the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector (rendered, in homage to a character from one of Lispector’s novels, as a cockroach) to Chantal Joffe’s impressionistic study of the German artist Charlotte Salomon painting in a meadow. Many of the women depicted here were overlooked and underappreciated in their lifetimes, but their work and spirit of creativity have outlasted them. As Joffe says, “You can make work in the absolute worst of circumstances, and for women that’s so often the case.”
Interviews have been edited and condensed.
Chantal Joffe on Charlotte Salomon
Just before the pandemic, I saw a show of Salomon’s work at the Jewish Museum London. The pictures are brightly colored — they look cheerful — but everybody’s disappearing out of windows. In reality, the work is unbelievably dark: Salomon is thought to have been sexually abused by her grandfather; her mother committed suicide; and, ultimately, she was murdered in the Holocaust.
There’s a very good Griselda Pollock book about Salomon [“Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory,” 2018]. One of the most heartbreaking parts is when she’s taken to Auschwitz and is asked her profession. She tells them, “draftswoman.” On some magical level, she still believes that art will save her. But she’s pregnant, and they kill her immediately. It’s her extraordinary achievement as a Modernist artist that I would like more people to see. [Her art] only survived the war by sheer chance.
When I’m painting someone from history, I’m trying to reach across time and make them feel alive again, as if we could have a conversation through the work. Here, Salomon’s looking back at me, going, “Oh, yeah, I’m here and you’re there, painting me. Something of me survives.”
Shanique Emelife on Lorraine Hansberry
With her play “A Raisin in the Sun” (1959), Lorraine Hansberry was able to translate the world around her into what she presented onstage. That’s what I want to do as an artist, too. She had a real respect for womanhood and feminism, as you can see in the characters Mama and Beneatha. She clearly thought of women, especially Black women, as clever, as powerful. They are the leaders of our community.
Hansberry was also a queer woman, and deeply politically committed — radical, even. The name of my painting “Twice Militant” comes from a quote of hers: “The most oppressed group of any oppressed group will be its women, who are twice oppressed. ... As oppression makes people more militant, women become twice militant.”
[Before I made this portrait], I saw this photograph of her where she’s holding a cigarette and looking up with this almost wild — but at the same time soft — expression. And that’s what it’s like to be an artist. There’s just so much going on in your head.
Juliana Huxtable on Clarice Lispector
I read Clarice Lispector’s book “Near to the Wild Heart” (1943) in 2018 and fell in love with it. I was shocked by the way she was able to capture a romantic but fiercely independent spirit, one constantly struggling with questions of what freedom means within the confines of different stages of life.
This painting of her was inspired by her novel “The Passion According to G.H.” (1964), which is about a woman sculptor who is alone in her house when she sees a roach — which sends her into a bout of insanity and leads her to these mystical ruminations on time and the symbolism of nature. The roach will outlive human beings. Even though roaches are universally maligned, they’re a resilient, regal species.
The more you get into Lispector’s work, the more insane it is. I think she opened up one of the richest and most stylistically specific literary worlds through curiosity and introspection. [Her writing has taught] me how to linger in thought — how to find wonderment in the mundane.
Cheyenne Julien on Belkis Ayón
I encountered Belkis Ayón’s work during my sophomore year at the Rhode Island School of Design, around 2014. Before I even knew what it was about, I had a sense that there was this deep sadness to it. A lot of my work comes from moments of anxiety and trauma, so I really felt like there was something that she was tapping into that I could relate to. Maybe it was through her use of monochrome and the way that none of her figures have mouths, but their eyes are so expressive. That’s something that I carry over in my work.
Her work focuses on Abakuá, an all-male Afro-Cuban secret society, but she chose to highlight the only woman figure in the mythology, Princess Sikán. [From her pieces] I learned the power in reframing a narrative, the power in storytelling.
Because there aren’t that many images of her online, I had to make up a lot of things [in this painting], so I took a reference photo of my body and then put her head on it and compiled a bunch of images of different printmaking studios. I was interested in creating a space around her that felt chaotic but showed some of her works in the background. I wanted her to be in her element.
Livien Yin on Miyoko Ito
I love the way that Miyoko Ito creates environments that are landscape vistas but that are also suggestive of intimate psychological interiors. In my work, I look at a lot of archival photographs of early Chinese immigrants to the United States. [The photos] tend to be more ethnographic and less suggestive of the complexity of these people’s lives. Ito’s use of color is one way to suggest the inner lives of the people in these historical photographs.
Ito once said that “each new painting seems like the beginning of painting.” Staying in a mind-set of exploration rather than striving toward a mastery of a medium is, I feel, the most engaging aspect of being an artist. She just continued on with it, despite not having a lot of external affirmation from the art world. She continued to give herself permission to make her work, despite what anybody else was saying.
Legends & Heirs
Women at the top of their creative fields on a younger artist who inspires them.
Danai Gurira, actress and playwright (right), picks Dominique Thorne, actress
Graciela Iturbide, photographer (left), picks Maya Goded, photographer
Paula Vogel, playwright and writer (right), picks Sarah Ruhl, playwright and writer
Shirin Neshat, visual artist and filmmaker (right), picks Emel Mathlouthi, singer-songwriter
Margaret Cho, comedian and actress (left), picks Atsuko Okatsuka, comedian
Ulla Johnson, fashion designer (right), picks Raven Leilani, writer
Mira Nair, filmmaker (left), picks Aneeth Arora, textile maker and fashion designer
Jeanette Winterson, writer (left), picks Eleanor Shearer, writer
Gina Prince-Bythewood, screenwriter and director (right), picks Thuso Mbedu, actress
Juliette Lewis, singer-songwriter and actress (left), picks Sophie Thatcher, actress
Joy Harjo, poet and writer (right), picks Layli Long Soldier, poet and writer
Denyce Graves, opera singer and director (top), picks Symone Harcum, opera singer
Anna Deavere Smith, playwright and actress (left), picks Michela Marino Lerman, tap dancer, musician and choreographer
Margaret Atwood, writer (left), picks Mona Awad, writer
Sharon D Clarke, actress (right), picks Alexia Khadime, actress
Wu Tsang, multidisciplinary artist (right), picks Klein, musician and filmmaker
Gabriela Cámara, chef (right), picks Monica López Santiago, chef
Marina Abramović, conceptual artist (right), picks Sondra Radvanovsky, opera singer
Tourmaline, visual artist (right), picks Xoài Phạm, multidisciplinary artist
Sigrid Nunez, writer (right), picks Weike Wang, writer
Ruth Rogers, chef (right), picks Nina Raine, playwright and director
Wangechi Mutu, multimedia artist (left), picks Priscilla Aleman, multimedia artist
Bernardine Evaristo, writer (right), picks Lynette Linton, playwright and director
Joan Baez, singer-songwriter and visual artist (right), picks Lana Del Rey, singer-songwriter
Marlee Matlin, actress (right), picks Teyana Taylor, singer-songwriter and actress
Maria Grazia Chiuri, fashion designer (left), picks Zadie Xa, interdisciplinary artist
Emily Watson, actress (left), picks Aisling Franciosi, actress
Howardena Pindell, painter (left), picks Melissa Cody, textile artist
Naomi Watts, actress (right), picks Elle Fanning, actress
Rita Dove, poet and writer (left), picks Safiya Sinclair, poet and writer
Cheryl “Salt” James (right) and Sandra “Pepa” Denton (left), a.k.a. Salt-N-Pepa, musicians, pick Issa Rae, actress, producer and screenwriter
Madhur Jaffrey, actress and writer (left), picks Michelle Zauner, a.k.a. Japanese Breakfast, singer-songwriter and writer
From the poets Audre Lorde and Pat Parker to the visual artists Yayoi Kusama and Georgia O’Keeffe, read more about how female mentor-mentee relationships have shaped artistic history.