For as long as there have been artists, there have been mentors who have helped those artists find their way by offering a gentle nudge, an honest critique, or simply a strong example. These relationships are especially vital for artists who operate outside of conventional systems of power. Generation after generation, women have offered one another behind-the-scenes, alternative education. These bonds go on to shape art and art history in ways that may never be fully understood by the public.
In an effort to offer a clearer picture of these formative ties, CULTURED asked 16 female artists to share the story of a mentor or mentee who challenged and shaped them. Some have worked together for years; others have met only on Zoom. Sometimes, the role of mentor and mentee has blurred, or even switched, over the course of the relationship. In all cases, the artists have been indelibly altered by the support and fellowship of one another.
Michelle Grabner on Molly Zuckerman-Hartung
"Molly regularly reminds me that when I visited her studio in the post-bac program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I would nurse my infant daughter while discussing her paintings. While I don't remember Molly's recollections of her post-bac year, I do vividly recall her work, attitude, and intellect as a graduate student in the painting and drawing department at SAIC. Upon graduating, Molly and several of her precocious MFA cohorts started the artist-run space Julius Caesar, which continues today as one of Chicago's most esteemed artist spaces.
Today our previous conventional roles as teacher-student are reversed. Molly's indomitable experimentation both in the studio and in her writing gives me courage to upend or at least deeply analyze the structures, ideas, and visual vocabularies that are solidly in my grasp. And while we possess vastly different approaches to form and organization, Molly's persistent interest in navigating the hierarchies of culture with varied theoretical and historical material keeps me and my thinking critical, reflexive, and importantly skeptical of my own authority. This teaching is not achieved through any sort of conventional form but through the proximity of friendship, passionate conversations, and a rigorous belief in critique. By sharing her own risk-taking with me, she not only keeps me evaluative and literary, she insists that I thread my life and work with perpetual experimentation, testing, and then more experimentation."
Cassi Namoda on Susan Cianciolo
"I first met Susan Cianciolo over a decade ago. I was 22. My partner at the time ran an experimental studio and told me that there was this incredible designer that I had to go see, and she was showing tomorrow evening in a loft on Greene Street in Soho. I had just previously met Maryam Nassir Zadeh at her bespoke museum-like store that was a portal and a world in itself.
Susan and I met the evening of her show. It was a pure synergy between us. All the whilst, I had started to work with Maryam Nassir Zadeh and later also became a studio assistant to Susan Cianciolo at her atelier on Rivington Street. The positioning of both relationships anchored so much of how I work and create today. The balance between motherhood and creative practice, attention to detail but also a nonchalance that is profoundly effortless, spiritual sensing around work and life, is formed by these relationships.
Later on, I would write a letter to Susan for her second cookbook edition titled This Cookbook Is Made For The 5th Dimension on how the times spent in her dimension led me to many aspects of my life and creative practice."
Bisa Butler on Adebunmi Gbadebo
"For more than a decade, I was a high school art teacher. One day while teaching, a student told me about his older sister, Adebunmi Gbadebo. Adebunmi is a brilliant artist in her own right who happened to be looking for a job as an artist assistant. We connected right away and it is hard for me to say who was the mentor and who was the mentee. While I was working and exhibiting, Adebunmi was always pushing me to try new things and expand my repertoire. As my assistant, Adebunmi would travel with me and experience the art world at my side. She was able to learn vicariously through some of my most challenging times. These days, Adebunmi is now creating her own work full-time and exhibiting at some of the top venues in the world. To this day, I consider her an inspiration, colleague, mentor/mentee, and most of all, a friend."
Cynthia Talmadge on Bobbie Oliver
" I first met Bobbie Oliver when I was a freshman at RISD. She was the head of the painting department that year and had to give a slide talk to freshmen who were thinking of selecting painting as their major. She walked into one of the oldest rooms on our very New England campus wearing the most glamorous knee high boots and quiet but powerful energy. I remember the presentation being serious, honest, and weirdly elegant for an audience of undergrads. We became friends in around 2015. She’s worked in London and then New York since the '60s, so there is very little I haven’t learned just from being around her. Her practice is quite different from mine but what her work means to her and how it functions as part of her life is really inspiring. She’s friends with artists of all ages and incredibly generous, which is something I think is so important."
Sarah Martin-Nuss on Yuan Fang
"I first encountered Yuan Fang’s artwork at SVA’s MFA open studios in 2022. A few months later, I was coincidentally introduced to Yuan by Leo Rogath at Emily Ferguson’s opening at Prince & Wooster. One of the most valuable things I’ve learned from growing close to Yuan and witnessing her painting practice is how deeply physical painting can be. We both work on a large scale, engaging our whole bodies in the process. There’s something profoundly grounding about knowing that while I’m in my studio, lost in my own process, Yuan is in hers, equally immersed. It’s a quiet but powerful support system—built on mutual admiration, a shared work ethic, and an unspoken understanding of what it means to devote yourself to a practice."
Aryel René Jackson on Deborah Roberts
"I first met Deborah Roberts in October 2017 after introducing the late William Pope.L for his lecture at the University of Texas at Austin. Deborah Roberts’s innovative use of found images and her thoughtful reimagination deeply influence my artistic practice, reinforcing my confidence in my own creative path."
Martine Gutierrez on her mother
"My mom, who's an architect and photographer, has been my biggest advocate ever since I can remember. I was an exquisitely odd child, often feeling I didn't fit in or belong. No matter the self doubt or struggle, mom always made sure I knew I was loved. Her assurance taught me to follow my heart as a woman and my intuition as an artist. To be true to yourself you must first figure out who you are."
"When I was a graduate student in the Visual Arts Program at MIT, Joan Jonas was hired as a professor. I was her teaching assistant for a performance and video class, and took her performance class. She’s followed my work; we still meet for dinner in the city.
There are things that Joan said about her work and methodology that I repeat to my Cooper students: 'The performance, video, or film takes as long as it needs to take, and if your audience doesn't like it, that's too bad. The piece takes the time that it needs to take.' She puts the work first, and trusts it, even when there were whole decades in which people weren’t looking at it. That’s particularly inspiring to me, especially as a female artist.
I love how Joan recycles her work. In the art world and throughout art history, there’s often this need to date each piece. Joan sees her work as a whole; she’s comfortable grabbing footage from 20 years ago and reusing it because she has it, there’s something that resonates—it might not be conceptual, but there's something about the image that, now, instead of being a performance, makes sense inside one her wooden viewfinders."
Sheree Hovsepian on Barbara DeGenevieve
"I met Barbara DeGenevieve sometime in the late '90s, when she came as a visiting artist to my advanced photography class at the University of Toledo. I wanted to go to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where Barbara was teaching as a core member of the photography program. At SAIC, Barbara was a force. In her classes, we took part in rigorous critiques, read Julia Kristeva, and talked about porn as art. Her own work was interested in challenging codes of censorship by pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable—centering the body as a source of pleasure, power, and agency.
She died in 2014. I often wonder, if she were still alive, what would she think of what is happening in the world today as the culture of feminism is often centered around victimhood and government rhetoric is stripping us of our agency. But I also think about how Barbara's influence lives on through the artists she mentored—those of us who push boundaries, challenge conventions, and expand the discourse in our own ways."
Ghislaine Leung on Andrea Büttner
"I said I'd interview her for an online journal I was interning for. She was studying with my partner. She showed. Had shows. We had a running joke about 'Doing Well.' Like we would all do a show about doing well and make art that looked like art that did well. We laughed about that. Although I couldn't make any work back then anyway. Probably because I thought I should be doing well. So I interviewed her in my studio, it was a box room office in the old care home we lived in as guardians. I tried to make myself do a drawing in there once. I couldn't. So we did the interview and went downstairs, and she said maybe we should do the interview again. Because there was a lot of talk and presenting and now that was all out maybe we could actually just speak. So we did the interview again. And she spoke about institutional critique in Berlin in the '90s and shame, and about self reflexivity, about thinking about institutional critique from there, from how you worked, how you felt. And about falling, we talked a lot about falling. I guess it all went in. And some stuff that I didn't get then, and do now. And here we are."
Carmen Winant on Catherine Opie and Mierle Laderman Ukeles
"Two different people come to mind: Catherine Opie was my professor at UCLA and has remained a close friend and mentor, in addition to being my teacher there for five years and helping to shape me as a feminist artist. For such a famous artist, it was remarkable how closely she worked with undergrads, I think now. She taught me 4x5, she introduced me to so many women photographers, she guided me through the early moments, as I was wrestling with how and why to make pictures. Cathy then hired me to work in her studio (after a failed interview on my part with her gallery in LA, which she'd set up on my behalf after graduation), where I scanned much of her early work—another education. We have continued to be in conversation in all sorts of ways, formal and informal channels. Cathy was an important mentor for me in how to make your way as an artist, but also, I realize now, in how to be a teacher.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles has been a mentor of a different kind. Before I knew her, I was (truly) changed by her work, which I first encountered in a labor studies class in college. Even before becoming a mother, it convinced me there was a meaningful way to center maternal labor as creative practice. (Her maintenance manifesto and the work that followed it has likewise informed two generations of feminist artists; I am not alone here!) I approached Mierle cold in my 30s the old fashioned way: by writing her a letter. She responded. We spoke on the phone after that, for well over an hour, laughing all the way. We wrote letters back and forth from that point (she lives in Israel). We have never met in person but continue to Zoom. She has graciously Zoomed into multiple classes I've taught as well, at Yale and at OSU, always willing to speak with my students. Kind of remarkable for someone of her stature."
Alisha B Wormsley on Ellen Sebastian Chang
"I met Ellen Sebastian Chang in 1998. I was 19, in Berkeley, California, when I was a student there. She was good friends with my aunt—she had just had her child and needed a sitter for her newborn baby. Ellen and her husband Sun Hui paid me to care for their child but also cared for me in so many ways. Ellen was mostly working as a director and educator at the time, which I knew, but I didn’t really understand how amazing and prolific she was. That became clearer while I was hanging out at her house while the baby was sleeping. Going through her incredible book collection, seeing production posters around the house with her as director and writer, taking phone messages from Alice Walker and Whoopi Goldberg, asking myself, Who is this woman? She wrote a play about one of my biggest ancestor influences, Zora Neale Hurston, so I learned so much about Zora from her. I could write for days and not cover the extent of what Ellen has given me over the years, not to mention WORK (paying jobs)—but really Ellen taught me how to be an artist with integrity. With spirituality. Holding on to one’s soul and purpose. How to avoid/navigate gatekeeping and to be clear what success is for me and not for the art world or whatever. And to always pay folks for their work, share resources, and see collaboration in everything."
Lynn Hershman Leeson on Jeanne-Claude
"There were not a lot of mentors who were alive simultaneous to me. I looked at Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, both of whom I met in the books of the Cleveland Art Institute Library. Later, though, I had the good fortune to work with Jeanne-Claude [Denat de Guillebon]. This was enormously important as from her I learned about discipline, never giving up, having a sense of humor, and ways to persist into success. We met when Christo and Jeanne-Claude came to my hotel room installation at the Dante Hotel. Soon after, I was hired as associate project manager of Running Fence, and we worked together for about five years, during which time I met [artist and PS1 founder] Alanna Heiss. She too profoundly influenced me through her style, charisma, and inability to think anything was impossible. I feel very fortunate that they entered my life."
I met Ann Craven my sophomore year of college, when I took her life drawing class, that was 17 years ago. The class was seemingly straightforward. Learn to draw from life and how to depict form through line. But Ann, in her gently open way, transformed the class into something much more. She took us to see Philip Guston’s earliest drawings to understand the expressive capacities inherent in the weight, pressure, and width of a line. To grasp that the images we’ve come to know about a subject changes how we see it, she took us to see early Audubon drawings of birds, and then preserved real, dead birds.
In this way, how she structured this drawing class came directly out of her practice. In Ann's work, deer, moons, birds, cats, horses, flowers are subjects to address big unknowables about memory, death, and time. Learning from Ann early, taught me that as an artist you could be honest and uncomplicated about what your own spiritual questions really are, and to let those drive the work’s form and content.
Mika Rottenberg on Marilyn Minter
"I met Marilyn Minter at SVA in 1999. She taught third-year painting, and I [had] just arrived in the U.S. [from Argentina] and took her class. We clashed a bunch at first because she had a lot of opinions about my paintings that were big, bright, and obnoxious. I wanted to move into video, but she really wanted me to stay a painter at first. It took me the full semester to convince her I know what I'm doing. For the final project, I brought this video installation consisting of a mechanical horse and a girl with pigtails drinking endless yellow juice through a striped straw. She was convinced!
I call Marilyn every time things get tough and ask her opinion. I don’t always do what she says, but I always listen! Her work has been an inspiration as well as her moving in the world with lots of care and kindness. She's one of a kind."
Marilyn Minter on Jessica Stockholder
"I don't have a traditional mentee/mentor story, but I immediately thought of someone who reached out at a time when I was 'canceled' by the art world and felt pretty miserable. I never thought I was wrong in being the agent of sexual imagery, but I was devastated by the public reactions to my hardcore porn paintings.
Around 1993, I was in a group show at Max Protetch Gallery, and Jessica Stockholder, who I hardly knew at the time, asked if I would get lunch with her. I was thinking, Well, everyone hates me, my galleries are dropping me, she probably just wants me to help her get a job at SVA (where I was working at the time). But, she followed up with me, and I told her: 'Why don't you come over to my studio for lunch?'
She came over and said, 'I'm a real prude, and your show really disturbed me, so that's how I knew it was really good. How can I help you right now?' It was the last thing I expected. I was absolutely floored, so I mumbled, 'Do ya wanna trade?' She said, 'YES!' And she wanted one of the more disturbing pieces. She put it up in her guest room, and once in a while a guest who spent the night remarked that they saw it. And I have a beautiful piece of hers that hangs prominently in my living room. I have nothing but fondness for her talent and kindness."
Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven on Chantal De Smet
"Around 1989, after almost 12 years of a most intensive time of producing art, I found myself pretty isolated. There was always interest [in my work] but also a lot of incomprehension towards my message: too violent, too obscure, too hermetic. In a way, not contemporary. I hardly sold anything, I was reaching my 40s, no kids, working for money, living in an old factory. On top of that I used computers in an art world that worshiped 'the poetic.' The environments [in which] I had been thriving in my years as an artist so far were mostly occupied by men, setting their rules and views of what you were supposed to be.
Out of this mental void came an idea: I organized a sort of salon in my house with a writer, a painter, an organizer, a performer, a singer. During one of these events, art historian Chantal De Smet was participating. From 1989 to 1996, she was the first female dean of the Ghent Academy of Fine Arts (KASK). When she asked me to teach in her Academy, I first hesitated to give up a free and wild life. After some months she called me to say that there was no question of a 'no.' So, at the end of September 1991, I was a drawing teacher in Ghent, in an experimental new art class called 3D. My controversial output and attitude became a quality that Chantal needed in the vast community of 150 artists and theorists she was managing. Only five to 10 percent of the teaching crowd was female, so there was work to do.
Becoming a teacher taught me all about why good things are good, that self respect and self confidence are indispensable when you have a voice to raise. Having become a member of the teaching staff in Ghent placed me, in spite of my extreme self and my hostility towards most official art institutions, in an honorable position. My artistic voice started counting from the moment Chantal De Smet assigned me as a member of her academy. I became part of an anarchistic, challenging lot and could keep on growing together with my students into alternative visions of what art can be as well. Next to the status quo. Until now, as a feminist intellectual, she is still following my exploits, supporting and inspiring as she is, forever."
