About
In Women As/In Art, artist Leah Schrager and gallerist Emerald Gruin interview creators, critics, and curators about the role of women as and/or in art in history, the contemporary gallery scene, and online. Be she model, muse, co-creator, artist, painter, performer or X, where and how do women find agency and empowerment in art? Has the place of women as and/or in art changed over time and across different media? Can a woman just be art? Drawing from Schrager’s own experience as an artist whose “deceptively complex brand of feminism, expressed through the unashamed sexuality of her beautifully abstracted self portraits, makes her voice unique among new media artists” (ArtSlant, 2017), this podcast explores commercialism, sexuality, appropriation, celebrity culture, digital identity, and more through conversations with some of the art world’s most compelling and controversial figures.
Recent Episodes
Episode 20: Kurt McVey
Kurt McVey takes us on an insightful journey through the search for fresh art amidst staid institutions. He also asks Leah...
Episode 19: Olivia Miller
This WAIA Wednesday, the inspiring and incredibly thoughtful curator Olivia Miller discusses de Kooning’s ‘slashed’ women, opportunities and challenges of working...
Episode 18: Emma Shapiro
This week artist-activist Emma Shapiro talks with us about the exhausting liberation of being an art model, art censorship in social...
Episode 17: Andréa Stanislav
This week we dig in with Andréa Stanislav, covering the inspirational cross-fertilization of narrative film and fine art, the erotic yet...
Episode 16: Alexandra Schwartz
This week, the brilliant Alexandra Schwartz considers pay equity in arts institutions, craft traditions’ roles in art history, the re-evaluation of...
Episode 15: OONA
Ona meets OONA, as Leah gets to know the anonymous artist’s ideas on the value of female artists, applying the tenets...
Your Host
Leah Schrager is a digital artist and online performer. She is the model, photographer, artist, and marketer in/of her images. Her visual works apply a painterly aesthetic to bodily forms and often draw their material from her conceptual online performance practice. These include @OnaArtist (Instagram 5M), Sarah White (The Naked Therapist), and An American Dream (as herself). With these performances, Schrager situates her work in a contemporary hotbed of female (in)appropriateness, arousal, celebrity, fandom, and commercialism she she seeks to explore female biography and labor in today’s global society.
Schrager has been compared by journalists and critics to such seminal figures as Marina Abramovic, Marcel Duchamp, Laurel Nakadate, Diane Fossey, and Sigmund Freud. She and/or her work has been profiled in 1000′s of media outlets, including Art Forum, Monopol, The Huffington Post, Vice, Viceland, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, CBS News, ABC News, The NY Daily News, and Playboy. She has exhibited with Johannes Vogt Gallery, Castor Gallery, Roman Fine Art, and others; her work has been on view in notable museums such as Fotografiska, Museum of Sex, and the Museum of Visual Art in Leipzig; and her pieces and performances have been purchased by collectors world-wide.
Featured Guests
We interview the art world’s preeminent thinkers on women as/in art. This includes writers, artists, gallerists, filmmakers, and more.
Kathy Battista
Writer
Ana Finel Honigman
Writer
Laura Weyl
Artist
Episode 1: Kathy Battista
Kathy Battista is a writer, curator, and educator. We discuss the increase in representation of women in the art world since Kathy first started writing in the 1990s about feminist art, how older female artists are having their selling heyday, and much more. Image credit: Martine Gutierrez, Girl Friends (Anita and Marie), 2019. © Martine Gutierrez;...
Episode 2: Emerald Gruin on Frieze LA, motherhood, & Artist!
Emerald Gruin, owner of Gruin Gallery, has had an exciting career of showing new, emerging, and mid-career artists in LA and NYC. We chat in her living room the week after Frieze LA ’23. She shares her thoughts on Frieze LA, how motherhood has changed her, and her current show up (Dale Frank’s Artist!). Photo...
Episode 3: Ana Finel Honigman
Episode 3 interviews Ana Finel Honigman on leaving NYC, MLM scams, hot girl art, Richard Prince, Emily Ratajkowski, and much more. Ana FInel Honigman has been writing about art, with a focus on sexuality, sex work, mental health, and gender, for twenty years. She’s been published in Artforum, ArtReview, Frieze, Art in America, the New York...