Lost Fetish Files of Mid-Century S&M

Note: this article includes some sexually explicit and graphic content. There’s something especially spicy about mid-century, femme-dominant S&M — and that’s saying something, considering Sadomasochism has been shaking things up in the bedroom since (roughly) 1785, when the French philosopher Le Marquis de Sade first published his erotic fantasy novel, Les 120 Journées de Sodome (The…

Georgia O’Keeffe: She Lived Deliciously Alone in the Wild, Wild West

In 1934, Georgia O’Keeffe gutted the passenger seats from her A-Model Ford. It was time to make way for the only companion she needed, and wanted, out west: her art. There, in the dry heat of New Mexico, the pioneering female artist drove, hiked, and schlepped her canvases to the farthest corners of its blackened…

6 Ways to Introduce Joan Didion to the Next Generation

Is it just us, or has Joan Didion become the go-to heroine for millennial and even Gen Z “cool girls”? Move over Jane Birkin – by declaring allegiance to the late American writer on social media, Didion brings instant credibility and style to one’s online persona – even if one has never read The White…

The American Art Scene was a Man’s World, Until They Came Along

When Francoise Gilot split from Picasso, he prevented galleries from buying her work. Camille Claudel’s lover, Augustin Rodin, signed a number of her sculptures as his own, and after their romance ended badly, it’s rumored he told the Ministry of Fine Arts to stop commissioning her. If you walk through any museum, you’ll often see…

Unsung Heroes of WWII: The All-Female WASP Squad

Where there’s a will, there’s a way — but for pilot Jacqueline Cochrane, there had to be even more. “To live without risk, for me,” she said, “would be tantamount to death.” One of the biggest risks of her career was pioneering the US organisation, WASPS (Women Airforce Service Pilots). In the heat of WWII,…

Naked in the Mountains 100 Years Ago, She Invented the Advanced Selfie

Anne Brigman was turning up her selfie prowess about 100-years before the rest of us. For one, she was never the stoic, buttoned-up type, and felt more at home on a mountaintop than with a roof over her head. When Brigman stepped inside the lens of her camera, the result was a ‘selfie’ that looked…

Not Your Granny’s Old China: Her Plates Tell Stories of Feminist Rebellion

How might one celebrate International Women’s Day? Why not stick it to the patriarchy while simultaneously feasting on feminist chinaware. Ceramicist Pollyanna Johnson runs her cottage studio in the landscapes of Sussex, England, and claims the pastoral, rolling hills of her homeland as her first muse before “her experience of being a woman, and portraits…

She Was a Black Librarian Who Could Equal America’s Most Powerful Man

Today, we meet a heroine by the name of Belle da Costa Greene. Under the honey-hued lights of Manhattan’s Morgan Library, she became the guardian of the world’s greatest cultural treasures: not one but three Gutenberg bibles, illuminated manuscripts, originals by Da Vinci, Mozart, Michelangelo, and others – the list goes on (in its very own…

She Taught Amelia Earhart to Fly

Without Neta Snook, there may never have been an Amelia Earhart. “The Lone Aviatrix” of Iowa had been shattering the proverbial glass ceiling with her plane long before the Earhart took to the skies, and she did it in a plane she assembled in her parents’ backyard. In other words, Snook was the kind of…

The Forgotten Bohemian Queen of the Paris Art World: Leonor Fini

Bohemian “It Girl” of Paris, master of surrealist disguise and generally a badass female libertine, Leonor Fini was one of the most photographed people of the 20th century. And yet barely anyone I ask knows her name, even here in Paris, where she once ruled the bohemian Parisian art world, considered one of the few women…